Welcome to the Debian Development Wiki

Getting started

Debian is converting its wiki to Mediawiki. If you are seeing this page it means you have succesfully installed the WikiDev container image of MediaWiki, which contains a few completely new pages (like the one you are reading now) plus a small number Pages that are downloaded from the old wiki, and converted on-the-fly from MoinMoin to Wikitext (see the list here). From here on, the MoinMoin wiki, still alive at https://wiki.debian.org/, will be referred to as “the old wiki”.

This page introduces what we're doing and how you can help.

How the development environment is organized

For the time being, during the process of developing the tools, macros and conversions needed for the big conversion from MoinMoin to Wikitext, we are using a few software repositories on Salsa to maintain the tools.

There are three repositories responsible for most of the conversion work:

1. debwiki-dev-pages

The page you are reading can be found in the debwiki-dev-pages repository on Salsa. It contains pages for the new wiki (this one) that are not in the old wiki. It also contains several templates and macros which on the MediaWiki platform is saved as Pages. In fact, everything in Mediawiki is Pages, not only user content, but also Templates, Forms and other components used to produce the final site. If you'd like to work with editing pages and/or creating new content for the new wiki this is where you want to be working.

2. debwiki-dev-converter

The software components doing the under-the-hood conversion work can be found in the debwiki-dev-converter repository. Its main function is to convert Debian's old MoinMoin wiki markup to MediaWiki XML dumps, and will be used when the time comes to do the grand conversion. Now, we want to stress test it, find issues and see if improvements are needed, and that is one of the purposes of this wiki container.

At the moment the debwiki-dev-converter also is responsible for converting a bunch of sample documents from the old wiki to the new one, but this functionality will likely be separated out to its own repository in the future (Andrew?), so we can keep the conversion tools separate from the pages to convert. This will also make the debwiki-dev-converter software generally usable for other projects that want to do the same conversion.

If you are interested in working on the software that does the under-the-hood conversion to Wikitext, you need to work on this repository, and be in close contact with the maintainers.

3. moinmoin_onlinereader

Behind the scenes is the moinmoin_onlinereader, this is a software component that does an on-the-fly conversion of the Moin source to a Pandoc Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) from the live wiki.debian.org site. The moinmoin_onlinereader library logs in to the wiki and asks Pandoc to parse the rendered HTML and render it as wikitext. When the online reader logs into the Debian wiki, it is using your credentials, that you used to get this container running.

Unless you are interested in this part of the migration process, this component is unlikely to be of interest to you.

How to work on these repositories

The workflow for working with all of the above git repositories is the typical git workflow used in most open source projects, but we detail it here in case you need a reminder.

You need an account on Salsa. Once logged on, you can make a fork of the repository you want to work on. Clone your fork to your computer and switch to a branch, optimally named something relevant in relation to the work you want to do.

When done with your work, push the branch back to your repo fork on Salsa, and then write and submit a Merge Request (MR). Remember that your description must enable the maintainer to quickly review what your MR is all about, so be descriptive. Also, remember that atomic merge requests are much better than huge ones, and more likely to be accepted quickly and without a lot of back-and-forth with the maintainer. Be aware that a MR is like a PR on other platforms like Github, but it also adds a merge commit to the repo when it's accepted.

Finally, please be aware that it can take up to a few days for your merge request to get through manual review, so be patient!

Join us on Internet Relay Chat

If you'd like a real-time chat with developers and contributors to the new wiki, we have an IRC channel on OFTC named `#debian-wiki`, and try to have a presence there. You are encourged to join. Use any IRC client of your choice, or click this link: #debian-wiki (webchat), which will open an IRC client in your browser.

Keeping this development container up-to-date

To remind you, when you created this development wiki you pulled an image from upstream using podman, like this:

podman pull registry.salsa.debian.org/wiki-team/debwiki-dev-container:latest

At the moment, the content of this wiki is generated by the conversion system described above when upstream builds the container from the Dockerfile. The build process quite simply clones the development repos onto the image, so when you create the podman container these are already embedded in the image.

So in order to see updates that have happened, you need to pull a new image regularly. Be aware that old images are not deleted by pulling new ones, so you still have access to older ones if you so wish, or you can remove them using the podman utility (or for example cockpit if you are using that).

Just to remind you, this is how the container (i.e. the running instance of the image) is created:

podman run --rm -i \
    -p 8080:80 \
    --name=debwiki-dev-environment \
    debwiki-dev-environment:latest \
    <your-MOINMOIN_SESSION_443_ROOT-value>

A detailed description is available in the [1] file of the debwiki-dev-environment repo. But then again you probably know all about that since you got here.

Now the wiki can be viewed on http://localhost:8080/, like you are doing right now.

Links

These pages are from the old wiki imported to this container image, and perhaps of interest to the development work, especially focusing on translating files from MoinMoin system to Mediawiki.

The Original Introduction to the WikiRewamp Project
Other Conversations
Log of the MassEdit
Recommendations
A Testpage with a variety of Wikitext code.