Launchpad projects need wikis

Bug #240067 reported by TAC one
856
This bug affects 170 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Launchpad itself
Triaged
Low
Unassigned

Bug Description

Launchpad needs a Wiki unrelated to Ubuntu. When we opened our open source project (ubuntu related, in a way) i was uncertain about being allowed to use Ubuntu wiki to fill one (1) page about the project.

I really think you should provide a wiki to every project in launchpad (maybe with the chance to choose to have an external one).

The rationale is:
 - having an own wiki requires hosting. Why use launchpad for bugtracking and buying hosting space just for the wiki ?
 - Ubuntu wiki is inherently unrelated for many of the projects.
 - Launchpad's blueprints require an external site. This shouldn't be necessary

Related branches

Changed in launchpad:
importance: Undecided → Wishlist
status: New → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Abdulaziz Ghuloum (aghuloum) wrote :

I would like to add my voice here to hopefully add more attention to this issue.

Lauchpad is an almost complete (and most awesome) project hosting site, and when I searched for a code hosting for my project (released a year ago), I looked no further as the set of features seemed complete.

However, as others started joining in, it became necessary to start a mailing list, and launchpad did not offer them. So, I had to look elsewhere. So, now I have most of the project data in one place (launchpad) and the mailing list elsewhere (google groups). While both services are free, there is a barrier to contribution since people have to register for two different sites: one to report bugs and one to chat.

Now many people are asking for a Wiki. Again, I can probably find a free wiki hosting service, but I'll run into the same problem again. Now people have to know about three sites (actually four, since the project's main web site is also somewhere else). This is not optimal.

Integration is key here. Launchpad/bzr integration is great (you can link bugs to fixes). Questions and answers, bug reports, fixes, blueprints, etc., are all nicely integrated. As Wikis are ubiquitous nowadays for soliciting user-contributed documentation, tips, and ideas, I think that adding a wiki under the same framework would be even better.

So, I have to say "me too", and thanks for all the great work.

Aziz,,,

Revision history for this message
TAC one (tacone) wrote : Re: [Bug 240067] Re: Launchpad needs a wiki

> However, as others started joining in, it became necessary to start a
> mailing list, and launchpad did not offer them.

Well, actually Launchpad does offer mailing lists :)

Revision history for this message
C.Kontros (coryisatm) wrote : Re: Launchpad needs a wiki

*sigh* "Did" is past tense. It's obvious from the comment that they do now.

Has there been any headway on this? Launchpad guys? :)

Revision history for this message
Scott Severance (scott.severance) wrote :

I'd like to add my voice to this. Blueprints seem to be quite limited without the ability to collaborate around it. Having to link to an external wiki just seems strange...

Revision history for this message
Ursula Junque (ursinha) wrote :

launchpad-foundations regards all the Launchpad project base. Creating a wiki will effect the base, so it's more appropriate to set the bug valid to launchpad-foundations only.

Changed in launchpad:
status: New → Invalid
Revision history for this message
Greg A (etulfetulf) wrote :

Just thought I should add that Google Code has had wiki's for a long long time, and SourceForge has just launched MediaWiki hosting: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sourceforge_announces_hosted_apps.php

Revision history for this message
lszyba1 (szybalski) wrote :

One possible solution that would allow launchpad to add a wiki is adding a wiki folder inside of your repository and let the bzr repository manage the sourcecode of that wiki. This would look like this:

1. wiki folder gets created right next to trunk
2. launchpad provides a simple interface, edit, preview, save where permissions will be judged based on your membership/access to repository.
3. Would be great if wiki in itself be a moinmoin then parsing would be done by a moinmoin engine no work on launchpad other then setting it up.
4. I would be able to either edit the wiki via a web or just edit the wiki files using moinmoin syntax from within the repository.

This allows for easy syntax (moinmoin), allows for sourcecode edits/access, controls the permissions via repository. The only thing that needs to be done is for launchpad to list the files in wiki folder, render them using moinmoin engine, and provide edit,preview,save options. All history/reverts will be done by a user from within his bzr repository.

Hope this helps.
Thanks,
Lucas

Revision history for this message
Scott Wegner (swegner) wrote :

I'll add that Google Code also uses a version-controlled wiki. That is, the wiki data is placed inside the project's svn repository, and the actual rendered wiki always represents the latest version. Similar to what Lucas suggested, edits can be done via the web interface (which generates an automatic commit), or via version control checkout-edit-commit.

It would be very nice to see something similar in Launchpad.

Revision history for this message
Gustavo Niemeyer (niemeyer) wrote :

Yes, it needs one!

Revision history for this message
Martin Albisetti (beuno) wrote :

version-controlled wiki (bazaar, anyone?) would be too perfect :)

Revision history for this message
TAC one (tacone) wrote : Re: [Bug 240067] Re: Launchpad needs a wiki

On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 9:07 PM, Martin Albisetti <email address hidden> wrote:
> version-controlled wiki (bazaar, anyone?) would be too perfect :)

Agreed. But the most important thing is just to have a wiki, any kind.
If it's VC, even better.

Revision history for this message
Dread Knight (dread.knight) wrote : Re: Launchpad needs a wiki

A 'moinmoin' type of wiki with VC would totally rock!

Revision history for this message
lszyba1 (szybalski) wrote :

During last summer google of code there was some work done on moinmoin to allow for hg backend. http://hg.moinmo.in/moin/1.8-storage/ but I'm not sure how far they've gone. If it works then it could probably be easy to port the python code to use bzr.

Revision history for this message
lszyba1 (szybalski) wrote :

Here is a link that describes the moin storage engine situation.
http://the-space-station.com/2008/09/07/my-work-on-moinmoins-new-storage-engine-gsoc-2008

Revision history for this message
BjornW (bjornw) wrote :

I would like to second this request for a wiki. Bonuspoints for using version control for the wiki :)

Revision history for this message
rdb (rdb) wrote :

I third the request. :)
 It's been something I've found missing for a long time and it's the only reason why I also have my project registered under a wiki hosting site as well. I even want this more because then specs can be stored at my internal launchpad wiki instead of at an external wiki site. (In the blueprints edit page, there should also be a "link to wiki page" option for the spec url then.)

Revision history for this message
C.Kontros (coryisatm) wrote :

Really, I'd just like a simple MoinMoin setup like the Ubuntu wiki. https://wiki.launchpad.net maybe?

Revision history for this message
Fran Boon (flavour) wrote :

+1 for Wiki integration with LP
It /could/ be done as a plugin to a separate Wiki to provide the integration, this is the key part.
However I too am looking around for separate hosting just for the Wiki component of my project...LP seems to be able to handle all the rest :)

Revision history for this message
Alwin Garside (yogarine) wrote :

The only thing that bothers me about a wiki version-controlled in bazaar is the large amount of commits it would cause. (Though, off course, this could be remedied by placing the wiki in a different branch.)

Revision history for this message
Jacob Peddicord (jpeddicord) wrote :

Google Code seems to get away with placing wiki entries in svn.

Even something as simple as a bzr-backed wiki branch that displays files as Markdown/Textile/whatever would be immensely useful.

Revision history for this message
TAC one (tacone) wrote : Re: [Bug 240067] Re: Launchpad needs a wiki

On Sun, Jan 25, 2009 at 4:18 AM, Jacob Peddicord <email address hidden> wrote:
> Google Code seems to get away with placing wiki entries in svn.
>
> Even something as simple as a bzr-backed wiki branch that displays files
> as Markdown/Textile/whatever would be immensely useful.

Just a normal wiki would be nice. no need of bzr hacks

Revision history for this message
Jorge Gallegos (thekad) wrote : Re: Launchpad needs a wiki

Having blueprints as wiki pages, and whenever they are accepted/validated having them 'locked' would be more than enough :)

Revision history for this message
Alwin Garside (yogarine) wrote : Re: [Bug 240067] Re: Launchpad needs a wiki

No it wouldn't.

Where would you keep documentation, FAQ's and installation instructions?

On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 1:32 AM, Jorge (kad) Gallegos
<email address hidden> wrote:
> Having blueprints as wiki pages, and whenever they are
> accepted/validated having them 'locked' would be more than enough :)
>
> --
> Launchpad needs a wiki
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/240067
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

--
Alwin Garside
Email: <email address hidden>
Blog: http://www.yogarine.net
Twitter: http://twitter.com/yogarine
MSN: <email address hidden>
Phone: +55 83 9127 5361

Revision history for this message
Alwin Garside (yogarine) wrote : Re: Launchpad needs a wiki

@Jorge
Perhaps for you, but not for me.

Where would you keep documentation, FAQ's and installation instructions?

Revision history for this message
TAC one (tacone) wrote : Re: [Bug 240067] Re: Launchpad needs a wiki

As a workaround for the lack of a wiki, couldn't Launchpad give the
option to make a Bzr branch for every project accessible from the web?
That way one could upload htmls and images and link them from the main
project page ?
That would be very easy to do.

Revision history for this message
Alwin Garside (yogarine) wrote : Re: Launchpad needs a wiki

Actually, bzr branches are already available from the web, in some form. The problem is the files can't be edited from a browser, nor does it feature any kind of formatting.

Revision history for this message
TAC one (tacone) wrote : Re: [Bug 240067] Re: Launchpad needs a wiki

> Actually, bzr branches are already available from the web, in some form.
> The problem is the files can't be edited from a browser, nor does it
> feature any kind of formatting.

Sample url ?

Revision history for this message
Alwin Garside (yogarine) wrote : Re: Launchpad needs a wiki
Revision history for this message
TAC one (tacone) wrote : Re: [Bug 240067] Re: Launchpad needs a wiki

> @TAC one
> http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~vulpes-dev/vulpes/main/files

That's not what i meant.
I meant to have one of the branches of the project as checkout
accessible from apache.

Revision history for this message
lszyba1 (szybalski) wrote : Re: Launchpad needs a wiki

Can you guys move this conversation into a mailing list, and not this bug.

Does launchpad have some financing available. Last google summer of code there was an implementation done to store moinmoin wiki on a different backend. I'm not sure but if there were money involved then maybe it could be used to pay for writing the bzr backend. If not any volunteers to talk to moinmoin developers on speeding up the process of "moinmoin on different backend"?

Thanks,
Lucas

Revision history for this message
Alwin Garside (yogarine) wrote :

Ha, so what you basically mean is hosting an automatically updated working tree of a branch through a http server? ;-) Well... That could be useful for developer documentation, but I prefer a wiki that integrates nicely into Launchpad and can be edited by users.

Revision history for this message
TAC one (tacone) wrote : Re: [Bug 240067] Re: Launchpad needs a wiki

On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 5:01 PM, Alwin Garside <email address hidden> wrote:
> Ha, so what you basically mean is hosting an automatically updated
> working tree of a branch through a http server? ;-) Well... That could
> be useful for developer documentation, but I prefer a wiki that
> integrates nicely into Launchpad and can be edited by users.

Would be just a quick workaround - i.e. better than nothing.
In such case, the branch could be edited from the owners of the branch
(just create a doc-team for your project and, if you wanna make it
accessible to anyone, let it be a free group)

Revision history for this message
Neal McBurnett (nealmcb) wrote : Re: Launchpad needs a wiki

I agree with the utility of the "doc-team" use case that TAC notes. If there was a relatively clean url for the contents of the latest version of a given file, that would be most of what we'd need.

E.g. http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~vulpes-dev/vulpes/main/annotate/head%3A/src/README

but without all the surrounding chrome that would confuse an end-user. And of course I'd want it to be presented with an html mime type if it was an html file.

Revision history for this message
Alwin Garside (yogarine) wrote :

Sure, it'd have it's use, but it wouldn't be a wiki. End-users wouldn't know how to edit it, unless they learn how to use Bazaar. And it doesn't integrate nicely into Launchpad.

So, even if it would be useful, it's not relevant to this bug.

In my opinion, this should be implemented properly right away, so we don't end up migrating our docs from HTML to Wiki markup later.

Revision history for this message
C.Kontros (coryisatm) wrote :

Really, this has all got a bit out of hand. A simple MoinMoin wiki like the Ubuntu wiki would solve this bug.

Revision history for this message
Alwin Garside (yogarine) wrote : Re: [Bug 240067] Re: Launchpad needs a wiki

> Really, this has all got a bit out of hand. A simple MoinMoin wiki like
> the Ubuntu wiki would solve this bug.

Yes, I completely agree.

Revision history for this message
Evgeny Goldin (evgenyg) wrote : Re: Launchpad needs a wiki

Hi everybody,

Were there any updates on VC-controlled Wiki hosting ?
Thank you!

Revision history for this message
Martin Albisetti (beuno) wrote :

No, we are still committed to finishing our 3.0 cycle, where we update all the UI.
After September, we will plan the next year's worth of features, and the wiki is the #1 thing on our list ;)

Revision history for this message
Evgeny Goldin (evgenyg) wrote :

Thank you, Martin ! Looking forward to see new UI

Revision history for this message
PrivateUser132781 (privateuser132781-deactivatedaccount) wrote :

Very good news that wiki functionality is on the horizon after 3.0 release. I must say, both the UI stuff and strange requirements like linking to external wikis seriously diminish launchpad's attractiveness for small and simple projects (esp. compared to the very clean and simple Google Code). If simplicity could be coupled with the extremely strong collaboration features at would really serve all needs.

Revision history for this message
Craig Hewetson (craighewetson-deactivatedaccount) wrote :

I saw that there are a couple of blueprints in the "Launchpad Suite" Project that have to do with adding a wiki.

Can one of the launchpad devs please link this bug to one of them so that we can keep track of the particular blueprint.
The blueprint milestone will be interesting to most of us.

Revision history for this message
Craig Hewetson (craighewetson-deactivatedaccount) wrote :

Ignore my last comment, I missed the Assigned Blueprints section. But I see the blueprint isn't Approved or assigned a target milestone.

Revision history for this message
SoloTurn (soloturn) wrote :

include some existing wiki engine would be great, e.g. moinmoin.

developping an own engine seems to be overkill and bears the danger of distracting from the main launchpad purpose. 3.0 is a good example - reporting bugs got accidently switched off by hiding the links. seems javascript / ajax distracted :)

Revision history for this message
Tomas Borovsky (tborovsky) wrote :

Yes, I would like to see Wiki in Launchpad!

Revision history for this message
abcoates (abcoates) wrote :

Agreed, the wiki feature is also something GitHub has, and it's very convenient, I would really like to have the same on Launchpad.

Revision history for this message
motters (fuzzgun) wrote :

I'm currently evaluating whether I could move some of my projects from Google Code to Launchpad. Launchpad has many advantages in terms of bug tracking and project management, but the major ommission as far as I can tell is the lack of a wiki. You can add FAQ pages, but these appear to be plain text only. A wiki provides an easy way of explaining to users how to install and use the software, and can include images and code examples.

Revision history for this message
Eugenio M. Vigo (evigo-deactivatedaccount) wrote :

What I don't understand is how Launchpad can stress so much on building community-driven projects and lack such a feature... Wikis today are one of the most succesful and easiest systems to build an online community, and, most important, it's something everyone knows how it works because of Wikipedia's impact.

I hope to see this feature implemented.

Revision history for this message
Miloud B. (goundy) wrote :

I totally agree with you Eugenio, actually I asked on the irc channel multiple times about the wiki like if there were plans anything but seems the team doesn't care much about it for the time being.
I'm really waiting for this feature...

Revision history for this message
C.Kontros (coryisatm) wrote :

Unfortunately, this has stopped me from convincing 2 small projects to use Launchpad. :(

I wait for the day https://wiki.launchpad.net is used. :)

Revision history for this message
Frank Abel (frankabel) wrote :

Well, what yours recommend me to use as wiki in the mean time that Launchpad get one? I know that exist lot of free wiki hosting out there, but which one yours think is suitable to host a network management tool project that will be FLOSS, use Python as lenguage programming and ppa as main binary distribution method until we get big ;) My wiki requirements are usual, pages interlinked with occasionally images inside.

Thanks in advance and take this as a kink of workaround ;)

Revision history for this message
Craig Hewetson (craighewetson-deactivatedaccount) wrote :

If you want to choose a Wiki take your pick:
http://www.wikimatrix.org/

These are all the FLOSS python based Wiki's listed on the site:
http://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/Gazest%2BHatta%2BMoinMoin%2BSubWiki%2BSycamore%2BTracWiki%2BZwiki

MoinMoin seems to be a good option (also Google "sponsored" development on it)

As mentioned aboved, a wiki in launchpad is crucial to its adoption in the future and now.

Revision history for this message
Miloud B. (goundy) wrote :

Wow man...
What's going on ?
I was just browsing the bug party and looking at options how come I can change the status guys ?
I've nothing to do with this project... sorry my mistake

Changed in launchpad-foundations:
status: Triaged → Confirmed
status: Confirmed → New
status: New → Invalid
status: Invalid → In Progress
status: In Progress → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Miloud B. (goundy) wrote :

No way to reset it to Triaged... Sorry guys..
But how come I can edit this ?

Revision history for this message
Curtis Hovey (sinzui) wrote :

Onyl the project developer can set the bug to Triaged because onyl they can and look at the code and project goals to say they know it is a problem and they want to fix it.

Changed in launchpad-foundations:
status: Confirmed → Triaged
Revision history for this message
Miloud B. (goundy) wrote :

Yes Curtis, but how come I can set other status ? Since it's not my project.
Isn't that a bug ?

Revision history for this message
rdb (rdb) wrote : Re: [Bug 240067] Re: Launchpad needs a wiki

No, that's a feature. Everyone is allowed to change certain statuses. Launchpad is pretty open about a lot of things.

Revision history for this message
Curtis Hovey (sinzui) wrote : Re: Launchpad needs a wiki

This is not a bug, Contibutors do not need someone's permission to set most bug statuses. User are welcome to investiigate bugs and set statues to help a project. Triaged is special because it is for the core developers who have looked at the project code and goals. Many project get invalid bugs, or fix bugs without knowing it. Any person can contribute to a project by setting the bugs to their correct status.

Revision history for this message
Miloud B. (goundy) wrote :

Oh I get it.
Sorry for having messed up the status though, I really didn't know it was going to work ^^'

Revision history for this message
Saša Janiška (gour) wrote :

So, there is no hope that we'll see wiki in LP soon?

Too bad, it means we will do some serious reconsideration whether to use LP for our projects... :-/

Sincerely,
Gour

Revision history for this message
Jonathan Lange (jml) wrote :

We'd love to have a wiki in Launchpad, but it's not on the core team's roadmap for the rest of this year (see https://dev.launchpad.net/RoadMap).

We'll gladly help anyone who wants to contribute wiki support to Launchpad.

Also, I know that one Launchpad developer is working on a wiki in his spare time (see lp:wikkid). If you want to see a wiki in Launchpad, your best bet is probably to help him make wikkid rock.

Revision history for this message
Jean Daniel Browne (jeandaniel.browne) wrote : Re: [Bug 240067] Re: Launchpad needs a wiki

Hi,

A bit different than a wiki but showing some advantages for some audiences:

Is there a way to contribute to launchpad docs via a repository of
rst/sphinx sources automatically built by LP into html on commit.

IMHO, ideally, Launchpad would get both: a wiki and a set of Sphinx
docs. Over the wiki, the Sphinx docs have the advantages to be managed
by a source system. Sources can be edited locally with one's prefered
editor usually more powerful than an in browser editor (think about
search/replace, or editiing multiple buffers concurrently). They can
be proposed as pull branch, etc...

On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 1:04 PM, Jonathan Lange <email address hidden> wrote:
> We'd love to have a wiki in Launchpad, but it's not on the core team's
> roadmap for the rest of this year (see
> https://dev.launchpad.net/RoadMap).
>
> We'll gladly help anyone who wants to contribute wiki support to
> Launchpad.
>
> Also, I know that one Launchpad developer is working on a wiki in his
> spare time (see lp:wikkid). If you want to see a wiki in Launchpad, your
> best bet is probably to help him make wikkid rock.
>
> --
> Launchpad needs a wiki
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/240067
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of a duplicate bug.
>
> Status in Launchpad itself: Invalid
> Status in Launchpad Foundations: Triaged
>
> Bug description:
> Launchpad needs a Wiki unrelated to Ubuntu. When we opened our open source project (ubuntu related, in a way) i was uncertain about being allowed to use Ubuntu wiki to fill one (1) page about the project.
>
> I really think you should provide a wiki to every project in launchpad (maybe with the chance to choose to have an external one).
>
> The rationale is:
>  - having an own wiki requires hosting. Why use launchpad for bugtracking and buying hosting space just for the wiki ?
>  - Ubuntu wiki is inherently unrelated for many of the projects.
>  - Launchpad's blueprints require an external site. This shouldn't be necessary
>
> To unsubscribe from this bug, go to:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/240067/+subscribe
>

Revision history for this message
Jean Daniel Browne (jeandaniel.browne) wrote :

Sorry, I was off topic.

My idea is that each project hosted on LP could benefit to be able to
push static html or rst/sphinx sources to a conventionally named
directory or bzr branch. The html could be served by Launchpad at a
conventional URL of the project.

Cheers,

On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 1:57 PM, Jean Daniel
<email address hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> A bit different than a wiki but showing some advantages for some audiences:
>
> Is there a way to contribute to launchpad docs via a repository of
> rst/sphinx sources automatically built by LP into html on commit.
>
> IMHO, ideally, Launchpad would get both: a wiki and a set of Sphinx
> docs. Over the wiki, the Sphinx docs have the advantages to be managed
> by a source system. Sources can be edited locally with one's prefered
> editor usually more powerful than an in browser editor (think about
> search/replace, or editiing multiple buffers concurrently). They can
> be proposed as pull branch, etc...
>
> On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 1:04 PM, Jonathan Lange <email address hidden> wrote:
>> We'd love to have a wiki in Launchpad, but it's not on the core team's
>> roadmap for the rest of this year (see
>> https://dev.launchpad.net/RoadMap).
>>
>> We'll gladly help anyone who wants to contribute wiki support to
>> Launchpad.
>>
>> Also, I know that one Launchpad developer is working on a wiki in his
>> spare time (see lp:wikkid). If you want to see a wiki in Launchpad, your
>> best bet is probably to help him make wikkid rock.
>>
>> --
>> Launchpad needs a wiki
>> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/240067
>> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
>> of a duplicate bug.
>>
>> Status in Launchpad itself: Invalid
>> Status in Launchpad Foundations: Triaged
>>
>> Bug description:
>> Launchpad needs a Wiki unrelated to Ubuntu. When we opened our open source project (ubuntu related, in a way) i was uncertain about being allowed to use Ubuntu wiki to fill one (1) page about the project.
>>
>> I really think you should provide a wiki to every project in launchpad (maybe with the chance to choose to have an external one).
>>
>> The rationale is:
>>  - having an own wiki requires hosting. Why use launchpad for bugtracking and buying hosting space just for the wiki ?
>>  - Ubuntu wiki is inherently unrelated for many of the projects.
>>  - Launchpad's blueprints require an external site. This shouldn't be necessary
>>
>> To unsubscribe from this bug, go to:
>> https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/240067/+subscribe
>>
>

Revision history for this message
Neal McBurnett (nealmcb) wrote : Re: Launchpad needs a wiki

In terms of ideas and requirements, GitHub provides wiki-like features via their GitHub Pages feature. It optionally uses Jekyll. For details, see
 http://pages.github.com/

Revision history for this message
Tim Penhey (thumper) wrote :

Just a FYI, but I've started a project on Launchpad called wikkid that is a Bazaar backed wiki that I intend to get merged into Launchpad.

summary: - Launchpad needs a wiki
+ Launchpad projects need wikis
Jonathan Lange (jml)
tags: added: ubuntu-platform
Revision history for this message
Fabio Varesano (fabio-varesano) wrote :

I'd say this is absolutely critical!

William Grant (wgrant)
Changed in launchpad:
status: Invalid → Triaged
Revision history for this message
Zearin (zearin) wrote :

So, happy new year! :)

It’s now 2011, and this bug was reported mid-2008, so…that makes 2.5 years people have been wanting a wiki in Launchpad. Do you think the LP team might set a New Year’s resolution to actually get something started here?

I mean, look at SourceForge, Google Code, Tigris, Github…you name it. Wikis have become standard in Open Source communities because they have been *battle-tested and proven* to be an *essential* tool.

Please please pleaseee make this a high-priority!

Revision history for this message
Michael Farrell (micolous) wrote :

Oh well, seems after 2.5 years something which has become a "standard" feature in project hosting is not available on Launchpad. Even back in the old days of SourceForge you could do this by installing some other wiki software in your project's webspace hosted by SourceForge, then they added it internally. On Launchpad you can't even do that.

I'm not even worried anymore about this bug - I'm moving what little I had hosted here elsewhere.

Revision history for this message
Zearin (zearin) wrote :

Sorry to hear that, Michael. I feel pretty similarly, although I'm not prepared to jump ship just yet. But my faith dwindles. :(

What REALLY kills me is that if you goto Blueprints for Launchpad itself…

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/launchpad

…it says the following:

Launchpad itself does not use Launchpad for planning or documentation.

Launchpad itself has a wiki, which may be used for feature plannning and documentation.
Launchpad itself wiki

***
No wonder this bug is marked as Low Importance. The LP team *ALREADY HAVE* their own wiki. Are they totally losing touch with LP users or what?

Revision history for this message
Robert Collins (lifeless) wrote : Re: [Bug 240067] Re: Launchpad projects need wikis

While we'd love to implement this bug, it is at the priority it is
because we're currently digging ourselves out of a technical debt hole
we got ourselves into: we had too many features, minimally
implemented, with problematic performance and scaling characteristics.
We're consolidating and working hard to make the *existing* features
fast and more cohesive.

All I can ask is that you have some patience: this is a feature that
is important to us and something we would like to do, but it is
neither trivial to do nor the thing our users are telling us about the
most as being an issue.

Revision history for this message
xaav (xaav) wrote :

Seems is would be the most simple to just copy the code that powers dev.launchpad.net over to wiki.launchpad.net and then adapt it for many projects, change the CSS, and you would have a working wiki. Anything is better than nothing.

Revision history for this message
Robert Collins (lifeless) wrote :

On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 11:56 AM, Geoff <email address hidden> wrote:
> Seems is would be the most simple to just copy the code that powers
> dev.launchpad.net over to wiki.launchpad.net and then adapt it for many
> projects, change the CSS, and you would have a working wiki. Anything is
> better than nothing.

The devil is in the details; the constraints we need to match are:
 - scaling : we have 30K projects and growing, plus distributions.
This is a substantial collection of wikis to run, and most traditional
wiki software (like moin) is not geared for this sort of volume.
 - security : spam is a massive problem on dev.launchpad.net (until we
locked it down) so some lockdown is needed per project
 - provisioning : dev.launchpad.net is manually maintained, and we
cannot afford to provision 30K projects by hand, including renames

Projects that just 'need a wiki' can easily create one on wikispaces,
wikidot, googlesites - theres no value in Launchpad doing a half baked
wiki environment when there are solid ones already available which
projects hosted on Launchpad can use. We have a link you can fill in
to where the wiki is.

We will eventually do a good wiki implementation, and I share your
enthusiasm for it, but doing it badly will simply put us into catchup
mode where we are chasing problems for several years : we need to
allocate the resources to do it well, and then do it well. Right now,
our resources are committed to other things which are more important.

If you wanted to work on this yourself, I'd be delighted to put enough
time in to help you draft a LEP, but I estimate you'd be facing
between 80 and 120 man-hours of work for an experienced LP developer :
its not a trivial undertaking, and I wouldn't want you to think it was
easily doable in weekends and evenings.

-Rob

Revision history for this message
Jean Daniel Browne (jeandaniel.browne) wrote :
Download full text (3.7 KiB)

Robert, thanks for sharing your answers on this issue.

What about the proposition to have a conventional directory named say
<project>.launchpad.com at the root of a source depot, that the users
can fill with static html/javascript content with bzr push? and
launchpad would be expected to serve this content at
http://<project>.launchpad.com. I believe serving static content has a
much lesser impact on the infrastructure and scales better. Also, the
user can choose among many tools, such as Sphinx to create ans skins
his site.

The documentation of Python with Sphinx is truly impressive and this
is partly due to the powerful tools they can use on a local tree of
directory (emacs, bzr merge, grep, sed, etc ...) which is unavailable
to the wikis software.

Best regards,

Jean-Daniel Browne

On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 1:08 AM, Robert Collins
<email address hidden> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 11:56 AM, Geoff <email address hidden> wrote:
>> Seems is would be the most simple to just copy the code that powers
>> dev.launchpad.net over to wiki.launchpad.net and then adapt it for many
>> projects, change the CSS, and you would have a working wiki. Anything is
>> better than nothing.
>
> The devil is in the details; the constraints we need to match are:
>  - scaling : we have 30K projects and growing, plus distributions.
> This is a substantial collection of wikis to run, and most traditional
> wiki software (like moin) is not geared for this sort of volume.
>  - security : spam is a massive problem on dev.launchpad.net (until we
> locked it down) so some lockdown is needed per project
>  - provisioning : dev.launchpad.net is manually maintained, and we
> cannot afford to provision 30K projects by hand, including renames
>
> Projects that just 'need a wiki' can easily create one on wikispaces,
> wikidot, googlesites - theres no value in Launchpad doing a half baked
> wiki environment when there are solid ones already available which
> projects hosted on Launchpad can use. We have a link you can fill in
> to where the wiki is.
>
> We will eventually do a good wiki implementation, and I share your
> enthusiasm for it, but doing it badly will simply put us into catchup
> mode where we are chasing problems for several years : we need to
> allocate the resources to do it well, and then do it well. Right now,
> our resources are committed to other things which are more important.
>
> If you wanted to work on this yourself, I'd be delighted to put enough
> time in to help you draft a LEP, but I estimate you'd be facing
> between 80 and 120 man-hours of work for an experienced LP developer :
> its not a trivial undertaking, and I wouldn't want you to think it was
> easily doable in weekends and evenings.
>
> -Rob
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of a duplicate bug (476472).
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/240067
>
> Title:
>  Launchpad projects need wikis
>
> Status in Launchpad itself:
>  Triaged
>
> Bug description:
>  Launchpad needs a Wiki unrelated to Ubuntu. When we opened our open
>  source project (ubuntu related, in a way) i was uncertain about being
>  allowed to use Ubuntu wiki to fil...

Read more...

Revision history for this message
Robert Collins (lifeless) wrote :

We'd still need a bunch of work do do even plain html:
 - There are security implications with taking raw html and serving it inside the launchpad.net domain - javascript there could trivially access a users authentication cookie and hand that off to a malicious site :(. We've resisted having plain sites in the past due to concerns about being used to host porn or whatnot - but I think we could address that satisfactorily.
 - We'd need to handle renames and private projects gracefully

Doing something like github does with e.g. ReST and README from the trunk branch would be pretty awesome too.

I don't think a wiki is /all that/ much more work than a plain static site, or doing ReST on the fly from the bzr trunk. Tim Penhey's wikkid project is pretty awesome too, and he's had this bug in mind in his development of that.

I think what we need to do is wait for someone to step up and work on this - *at that point* do the design work to evaluation wikis vs static sites vs rest/markdown from source control.

Canonical itself will step up and work on this at some future date - the key consideration for us at the moment is our current in-progress work:
 - performance [our 99th percentile render time is 2.5 seconds - for LP to feel fast we need that to be consistently below 1 second]
 - agility - it takes us too long to change things in LP, and fixing that requires some considerable investment
 - message sharing for translations with upstream/downstream
 - better bug subscriptions - a *massive* source of user frustration
 - derivative distributions - we're making it easier for people to remix Ubuntu, and for Ubuntu to remix Debian.

When we've finished those 5 things we'll reevaluate all the feature requests we have and pick new things to work on.

Revision history for this message
Cristian Salamea (ovnicraft) wrote :

Hello, i see thus bug reported in 2008-06-14, its means this is not important to LP developers for this reason many projects migrate to another project platforms.
Please consider this bug, formatting text in comments system helps too much for developers with tags or anything else.

Revision history for this message
xaav (xaav) wrote :

I will work on this bug for about 3-4 months. I'm not an expert at python, and I haven't touched laundpad before, but I'm hoping this will encourage the launchpad team to step up and fix this bug.

If this isn't done in 3-4 months, I won't be fixing it. However, I will try my best to get something started on this.

Wish me luck.

Changed in launchpad:
assignee: nobody → Geoff (geoffreyfishing)
heere pomare (1982hp)
Changed in launchpad:
status: Triaged → Fix Committed
status: Fix Committed → Fix Released
Jonathan Lange (jml)
Changed in launchpad:
status: Fix Released → Triaged
Revision history for this message
xaav (xaav) wrote :

What? I haven't even started coding this yet; this isn't a fix committed.

On another note, I'm planning the specification on the whiteboard here:

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/launchpad/+spec/wiki-hosting

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Revision history for this message
xaav (xaav) wrote :

Okay, finally after after a couple of hours, I have the code checked out.

Changed in launchpad:
status: Triaged → In Progress
Revision history for this message
xaav (xaav) wrote :

Basic application structure created.

Revision history for this message
xaav (xaav) wrote :

> If you wanted to work on this yourself, I'd be delighted to put enough
> time in to help you draft a LEP, but I estimate you'd be facing
> between 80 and 120 man-hours of work for an experienced LP developer :
> its not a trivial undertaking, and I wouldn't want you to think it was
> easily doable in weekends and evenings.

> -Rob

@lifeless If you could help me out, that would be great; I'm brand new to the lp codebase.

Revision history for this message
Saša Janiška (gour) wrote :

Hello!

I like bzr but not having wiki is the main missing feature to keep me using Fossil which integrates everything in a slick package.

Not having wiki at LP, means we are going to use Fossil or Github via bzr-git, but I'm afraid that it won't pull us to Git which we really do not like.

Please, please, do something about it...

Idea from the whiteboard to use markdown markup or simply render static files produced with reST/Sphinx would be superb.

Sincerely,
Gour

Revision history for this message
xaav (xaav) wrote :

Anyone fluent in python is welcome to help me; just branch https://code.launchpad.net/~geoffreyfishing/launchpad/wiki and request a merge back into that branch.

Revision history for this message
xaav (xaav) wrote :

Sorry; wrong branch URL; it's lp:~xaav/launchpad/wiki

Revision history for this message
Robert Collins (lifeless) wrote :

@Geoff - cool, I'm glad you're stepping up to tackle this. There are a few different things/places folk have talked about wanting wikis. In order to help make sure your project is successful, we should be clear about what it is you want to accomplish. Some examples might be:
 * A per-project wiki with history and multiple pages accessible under launchpad.net/project/wiki/*
 * let wiki syntax be used in fields like bug description, project summary etc
 * Make it really easy to put up a lot of welcome prose (like the README -> rendered markdown github does)

Theres a range of implementation choices available depending on exactly what it is you want to accomplish (and different challenges - more or less storage complexity, performance concerns etc). We use the https://dev.launchpad.net/LaunchpadEnhancementProposalProcess system to work bring clarity to this sort of thing. So the first thing is for you to visit https://dev.launchpad.net/LEP and create a LEP that describes clearly what you want to do - it doesn't (and shouldn't discuss implementation) : just a really clear description of your why-and-what.

Jono (as product manager) and I (as TA) will then help you make sure that what you work on will be acceptable to the Launchpad project, both in UI/functionality and implementation.

Just let me know (here or IRC, whatever is fine) when you have a draft LEP up, or if you need help putting it together.

Revision history for this message
xaav (xaav) wrote :

Draft: https://dev.launchpad.net/LEP/Wiki

Any feedback would be appreciated. Please let me know if I need to clarify any detail.

Revision history for this message
Tim Penhey (thumper) wrote :

@Geoff, I'm also keen to help get wikis into Launchpad.

I have been a launchpad developer for over four years and have switched teams
internally to do something new. I started the wikkid project as a way to get
a wiki into LP in a way that would fit.

I just noticed your LEP, and will comment.

Revision history for this message
xaav (xaav) wrote :

@thumper Really nice application. I'll merge it into my branch.

Revision history for this message
Neal McBurnett (nealmcb) wrote :

I'm excited to see new activity on this bug - thanks folks! But the
bug report itself is not the place to have the design discussions and
project planning. Please agree among yourselves where to conduct that
activity, and announce only the decision, or how to find it, here.

Revision history for this message
Robert Collins (lifeless) wrote :

@neal this is a fine place to have discussion around the bug.

Revision history for this message
Robert Collins (lifeless) wrote :

@thumper wikkid is cool but I think its too early to talk implementation - will do details on the LEP.

Revision history for this message
xaav (xaav) wrote :

@lifeless I had moved the discussion over to the launchpad-dev mailing list in response to nealmcb

Revision history for this message
Robert Collins (lifeless) wrote :

@geoff its fine to talk on the list too, but the bug should be kept up to date. I'm not sure why neal suggested it was wrong to discuss here, it really is fine.

Revision history for this message
Saša Janiška (gour) wrote :

@robert Just a point which you made "This seems like we're done already - just use a non-LP wiki..."(https://dev.launchpad.net/LEP/Wiki)

For many years I was darcs user and what finally moved me away from it were neither some missing feature nor performance issues but lack of public hosting solution (here I think not just about hosting repos, but bug tracker etc.).

That led me to Fossil which provides everything in a lite-package, but I really like bzr & LP and would like to use it for our open-source projects.

If we choose some major players like: Girthub, Bitbucket, Google, SF - all of 'em have wikis except LP: :-/

I do not like to think about using external wikis for our project and end as using LP for code & tracker, external wiki, another homepage and SF for downloads (real example).

In such case, I'm going to some of the above mentioned hostings, although, let me emphasize: I do really *like* bzr and simply *can not* grok git.

Sincerely,
Gour (hoping to see wiki at LP)

Revision history for this message
Andrea Corbellini (andrea.corbellini) wrote :

I'm not in the Launchpad team, but let me give my 5 cents. Forgive me if
I'm wrong.

On Mon, 2011-05-23 at 06:39 +0000, Gour wrote:
> @robert Just a point which you made "This seems like we're done already
> - just use a non-LP wiki..."(https://dev.launchpad.net/LEP/Wiki)

This phrase doesn't actually mean "we don't want to host wikis". This
comment (and many others) means: "before starting to think about the
implementation, we should carefully decide how the whole system will
work". The first step to do so is answering the question: why people
need a wiki? What can't they do currently, and what they'll be able to
achieve with a wiki? "An easy way to communicate information" is
something that's already available. So, either a wiki isn't needed
(wrong) or there's an another need to satisfy (correct). We should
however find what this need is.

Launchpad doesn't want to offer just a wiki, but rather a powerful,
complete and well-integrated wiki. Any software developed without a
clear aim risks to become totally unuseful and difficult to maintain.

Revision history for this message
Saša Janiška (gour) wrote :

> We should however find what this need is.

I believe there is no need to reinvent the wheel...assuming that Github, Bitbucket, Google & SF did some research and decided why they offer wiki and visiting some of the project on those 4 hosting sites would, I assume, quickly yield the correct conclusion. :-)

Revision history for this message
xaav (xaav) wrote :

Just spent 45 minutes updating the LEP. @lifeless Please comment.

Revision history for this message
Jonathan Lange (jml) wrote :

Very excited to see activity on this bug. I'll be looking at the LEP as soon as I can. Am keen to avoid something that's a "bolt on" like our code browsing, and would also like something that's much, much snappier than that too.

Also, I don't know of any case where an open source web service has had a major new feature developed by new contributors. It's definitely the kind of thing I'd very much like to see happen on Launchpad.

Revision history for this message
Jonathan Lange (jml) wrote :

I've done a pass over the LEP. Still very much in discussion phase right now. Keen to hear thoughts and to keep revising.

Revision history for this message
Oxwivi (oxwivi) wrote :

Are we integrating Ubuntu Wiki with Launchpad? I think that would be the best and easiest course of action.

Revision history for this message
Jonathan Lange (jml) wrote :

No. That would actually be really difficult and wouldn't help much for projects.

Revision history for this message
xaav (xaav) wrote :

@Robert Collins Can you please make another pass over the LEP? Thanks.

Revision history for this message
Julie Jones (julie-jones) wrote :

+1 Launchpad really must have a wiki. I would propose moinmoin. It has worked well for me in the past.

I am in the process of trying to find a new host for my company and bazaar would be preferable (although we might have to go with mercurial because of the lack of full featured hosts supporting bazaar.

One of the important aspects for us is that we can use one wiki for all our projects. We also need a bug tracking solution that lets us related bugs from multiple projects.

Revision history for this message
Robert Collins (lifeless) wrote :

@Geoff - I will on the technical aspects of it ( I'm subscribed to the wiki anyhow). jml is going to be unavailable this week so it will need to wait for him to return.

Revision history for this message
Robert Collins (lifeless) wrote :

@Julie hi. moinmoin isn't designed for mass hosting - and we're looking at tens of thousands of wikis. It is a possibility but there would be a chunk of work needed to go that route. We don't have a single-wiki-many-projects use case in https://dev.launchpad.net/LEP/Wiki at the moment. Would you like to add one?

Revision history for this message
Jean Daniel Browne (jeandaniel.browne) wrote :

Hi,

I opened a bug a while ago to be able to push HTML files via bzr to a
conventional branch name and be able to see these files served
statically by launchpad on a conventional URL on my launchpad project.

My bug was marked as a duplicate of this wiki bug, even though the
under-the-hood, the edition workflow, ressource usage and audience for
such a feature is very different than a Wiki application. One of the
main difference of my feature request is that I do not really want or
need to edit files via the browser, I am fine with my local text
editor.

The feature I describe is closely inspired from the <login>.github.com branch.

Now Github has came up with a feature which makes it super easy for
people to edit a file via the browser, github takes care of creating a
fork of the project and sends a pull request of your changes to the
owner of the file you edited.

https://github.com/blog/844-forking-with-the-edit-button

With Github, you can do both:
1. powerful local edit with vi/emacs,
2. simple through the browser edit

Keep up the good work on Launchpad,

Cheers

On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 7:59 AM, Robert Collins
<email address hidden> wrote:
> @Geoff - I will on the technical aspects of it ( I'm subscribed to the
> wiki anyhow). jml is going to be unavailable this week so it will need
> to wait for him to return.
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of a duplicate bug (476472).
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/240067
>
> Title:
>  Launchpad projects need wikis
>
> Status in Launchpad itself:
>  In Progress
>
> Bug description:
>  Launchpad needs a Wiki unrelated to Ubuntu. When we opened our open
>  source project (ubuntu related, in a way) i was uncertain about being
>  allowed to use Ubuntu wiki to fill one (1) page about the project.
>
>  I really think you should provide a wiki to every project in launchpad
>  (maybe with the chance to choose to have an external one).
>
>  The rationale is:
>   - having an own wiki requires hosting. Why use launchpad for bugtracking and buying hosting space just for the wiki ?
>   - Ubuntu wiki is inherently unrelated for many of the projects.
>   - Launchpad's blueprints require an external site. This shouldn't be necessary
>
> To unsubscribe from this bug, go to:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/240067/+subscribe
>

Revision history for this message
xaav (xaav) wrote :

I've updated the LEP. Please someone review it and either move it back to 'drafting' or 'approved'.

Thanks.

Revision history for this message
Martin Pool (mbp) wrote :

Hi Geoff,

I read the LEP. It's good.

> As a developer of an open source software project I want a wiki so that I can provide documentation to my users and plan my features more easily.

This is true, but perhaps the LEP will be easier to reason about if
rather than just "I want a wiki" we talk about what they want to do,
not how, in the As-A section. The word "wiki" has many associations
such as being publicly writable, and we should be clear about whether
we mean that or not, or this just gets circular, and jumps to
implementation. Wikis are _not_ an ideal answer for all jobs for all
projects; we can possibly do better.

It does get into that a bit, further down: a homepage, documentation,
feature planning, announcements, etc.

I can definitely see how people would want richer formatting in
announcements. It's not obvious to me that people want to put their
announcements into Bazaar branches just to get wiki formatting in
them.

I wonder about splitting this into several parts, probably done in this order:

 * rich formatting of user text into html, probably coming from
Markdown (or maybe ReST): this would allow announcements, bugs,
project descriptions, etc to look a bit better
 * do this also for the contents of branches, especially for their
README and similar files
   - tangentially, show those files within the main lp ui
 * through-the-web-ui editing of branch files
 * wiki-type navigation within files in a branch

hth,
Martin

Revision history for this message
xaav (xaav) wrote :

> I can definitely see how people would want richer formatting in
> announcements.

The way announcements are currently set up is so that you may link to an external website. The way it is done now in some projects is that they will put a "teaser" in the announcement, and then link to and external blog/website/etc. If we were to provide a wiki, they could simply link to a wiki page.

> It's not obvious to me that people want to put their
> announcements into Bazaar branches just to get wiki formatting in
> them.

Well, you wouldn't necessarily upload via bazaar, since in the "must have" section it mentions editing via web UI.

Actually, I was just planning on designating one of the project's code branches as the wiki branch, and then displaying the contents on http://wiki.launchpad.net/project-name. Of course, this would only display pages ending in .md, .txt, etc, and it wouldn't show a directory listing...

Revision history for this message
xaav (xaav) wrote :

Really all I am waiting on is for someone to approve the LEP. (It's currently in the "Ready for review" section)

Revision history for this message
Martin Pool (mbp) wrote :

On 4 June 2011 01:35, Geoff <email address hidden> wrote:
>> I can definitely see how people would want richer formatting in
>> announcements.
>
> The way announcements are currently set up is so that you may link to an
> external website. The way it is done now in some projects is that they
> will put a "teaser" in the announcement, and then link to and external
> blog/website/etc. If we were to provide a wiki, they could simply link
> to a wiki page.

That's true, but I think ideally you would be able to have rich
formatting within the announcement itself, rather than just a link. I
think the key thing here is that the concept of rich formatting
shouldn't be limited just to the wiki area. It doesn't matter so much
which one is done first.

>> It's not obvious to me that people want to put their
>> announcements into Bazaar branches just to get wiki formatting in
>> them.
>
> Well, you wouldn't necessarily upload via bazaar, since in the "must
> have" section it mentions editing via web UI.
>
> Actually, I was just planning on designating one of the project's code
> branches as the wiki branch, and then displaying the contents on
> http://wiki.launchpad.net/project-name. Of course, this would only
> display pages ending in .md, .txt, etc, and it wouldn't show a directory
> listing...

Launchpad wants to get away from using different subdomains for
different functional areas, so it should probably instead be
launchpad.net/project-name/+wiki/... or something. This would be a
good place to start. I think the LEP would benefit from describing
what is going to be done in the first phase.

Revision history for this message
Martin Pool (mbp) wrote :

On 4 June 2011 05:17, Geoff <email address hidden> wrote:
> Really all I am waiting on is for someone to approve the LEP. (It's
> currently in the "Ready for review" section)

If you're planning to work on this yourself you don't strictly need to
block on LEP approval to start discussing the implementation, or even
working on the code.

At the moment there is nothing in LP that directly shows branch
content within the main web app; it only comes out through Loggerhead,
and through the code review stuff which is done in the background.
This is something we'd very much like to change, but it will need some
careful thought and discussion about how to do it in a safely fast
way.

We also need to decide whether to do this from the main webapp or a
separate process.

I would suggest starting a list thread about the implementation, as
distinct from the LEP which gives the requirements.

Revision history for this message
Robert Collins (lifeless) wrote :

On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 12:08 PM, Martin Pool <email address hidden> wrote:
> On 4 June 2011 05:17, Geoff <email address hidden> wrote:
>> Really all I am waiting on is for someone to approve the LEP. (It's
>> currently in the "Ready for review" section)
>
> If you're planning to work on this yourself you don't strictly need to
> block on LEP approval to start discussing the implementation, or even
> working on the code.

In this particular case I have suggested we get consensus around what
we want to do: a poor (UI/concept/implementation) of a wiki in
Launchpad is something that wouldn't be accepted; I'd hate for Geoff
or anyone to put significant effort in and have it rejected.

-Rob

Revision history for this message
Martin Pool (mbp) wrote :

On 4 June 2011 11:52, Robert Collins <email address hidden> wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 12:08 PM, Martin Pool <email address hidden> wrote:
>> On 4 June 2011 05:17, Geoff <email address hidden> wrote:
>>> Really all I am waiting on is for someone to approve the LEP. (It's
>>> currently in the "Ready for review" section)
>>
>> If you're planning to work on this yourself you don't strictly need to
>> block on LEP approval to start discussing the implementation, or even
>> working on the code.
>
> In this particular case I have suggested we get consensus around what
> we want to do: a poor (UI/concept/implementation) of a wiki in
> Launchpad is something that wouldn't be accepted; I'd hate for Geoff
> or anyone to put significant effort in and have it rejected.

Same here. My point (maybe poorly expressed) is that what he needs is
a good clear plan, not for someone to rubber stamp it.

Revision history for this message
xaav (xaav) wrote :

Right now I've proposed some changes to wikkid and I'm waiting on the driver to comment on those changes.

Revision history for this message
Jonathan Lange (jml) wrote :

Hello everyone,

I've just done a big round of updating the LEP. Here's a summary of the changes:
 * Rewrote the "Rationale" to be a bit less strident and a bit more likely to convince folk around here to sponsor developmen
 * Updated to have a "User stories" section, which is something we're doing for all new LEPs
 * Pushed the markup requirements into "Must have"
 * Added a bunch of requirements that practically any off-the-shelf wiki would meet (page management, subscription management, printable pages)
 * Added a bunch of translation stuff to "nice-to-have"
 * Filled in the success metrics section
 * Moved implementation stuff into a separate section. Bazaar branches, wikkid, URLs.
 * Added lots of explicit must-have requirements for search

There were some debated points that I have made a decision about:
 * Attachments
   * These are essential, at least for images. https://wiki.ubuntu.com uses them, https://dev.launchpad.net/ uses them, wikipedia uses them.
 * Migration
   * Dropped this, but made "mass import" a nice-to-have
 * Bumped "privacy for wikis of private projects" to be a must-have

There are some requirements that I am unsure about, they are in the "Unsure" section. I have deleted some of the "discussion" there, because a lot of it boiled down to "I don't think so" and the document is getting pretty long.

OK, that's the summary done. Phew. Some more thoughts follow.

First up, I think we're making really good progress here in understanding what we want for our end users. The remaining points are things that, quite rightly, deserve some thought and conversation.

Second, the requirements we are gathering here are deliberately inclusive. We want to understand what it means to be finished, to have done this well. When someone proceeds with actually doing this, they will probably want to group the requirements together and deliver them incrementally, some one day, some another day. We

Third, it is genuinely important to set aside thinking about _how_ we'll do this in order to focus on _what_ we actually want to do. If anyone would like to think or wax eloquent about implementation approaches, they should please keep it out of the main section of the LEP. The ideal is that a LEP should be written in such a way that you could imagine three or four different implementation approaches.

Also, as a point of order, if you are making a comment on any wiki page, please say who you are and when you are making the comment, especially if "I think" forms any part of the comment.

Where do we go from here?

In no particular order, we need to:
 * Resolve the "unsure" requirements
 * Evaluate some choices of wiki technology (wikkid, mediawiki, moin, rolling our own, ...)
 * Break the LEP into sub-features / milestones / whatever. I'd suggest universal wiki markup as the first.

I really do hope this helps. Good luck.

jml

Revision history for this message
xaav (xaav) wrote :

> mediawiki

I don't see how this has anything to do with launchpad:

1. It's written in PHP. I know PHP pretty well, and I'm sure I could adapt this to launchpad's needs, but adding mediawiki here will only make it harder to develop launchpad; you'll need to know two programming languages.
2. It doesn't use bzr branches.
3. It's poorly written. I'm sure this is debatable, but in my opinion, it's poorly written. This is a side effect of PHP applications: everyone knows PHP, so sometimes devs aren't that bright.
4. Nightmare integration. Good luck making mediawiki look like it's part of launchpad. I won't be the one doing it.

Now, I'm sure it would be fairly easy to destroy my #2 and #3 arguments. However, #1 and #4 are real problems; I don't see the point of putting in extra work here.

> moin

In order to be as unbiased as possible, I think this could work. However, it doesn't meet this requirement:

Use a standard, existing markup language so that new users have less of a hurdle to learn Launchpad

It also doesn't use bzr to store pages, which is kind of a downside.
> wikkid

Developed by a canonical employee, uses bzr, meets the most requirements out of any of the three wikis.

> rolling our own

Instead of using existing work with wikkid or moin, let's just waste extra time by re-inventing the wheel. If there is any logic in doing this, I fail to see it.

Revision history for this message
Robert Collins (lifeless) wrote :

@xaav
the point of needing to do an evaluation is because its *not* trivially obvious hat implementation of 'wiki' we need. I'm not going to try and do that right now, but I will try and provide a framework for doing such an evaluation:
 - cost of maintenance - code we run needs to either be solidly maintained upstream, or we need to maintain it in the LP team
 - ease of achieving our integration goals
 - performance
 - expected quality of result

Revision history for this message
xaav (xaav) wrote :

> If this isn't done in 3-4 months, I won't be fixing it. However, I will try my best to get something started on this.

At this point, it has been a few months, and as promised, I have put too much time pouring over the launchpad code and getting this plan pushed through, I'm busy with other things by now. The biggest problem here is it takes too long to change something in launchpad. If I was writing my own application, I could have something basic out in less than 5 days!

I really am sad to do this, and I really hope this bug gets fixed. It just seems there are too many bugs to fix and not enough people to fix them. Hopefully I have encouraged someone else to fix this bug by now, but if not it will get shoved down to the bottom of the list due to all the other problems has (about 5000 of them).

Sorry it turned out this way.

Changed in launchpad:
assignee: Xaav (xaav) → nobody
Revision history for this message
Saša Janiška (gour) wrote :

> At this point, it has been a few months, and as promised, I have put too much time pouring over the launchpad code and getting this plan pushed through, I'm busy with other things by now. The biggest problem here is it takes too long to change something in launchpad. If I was writing my own application, I could have something basic out in less than 5 days!

Thank you for taking time and initiative to bring wiki to the LP.

Unfortunately, this is/was one of the important features in our evaluating bzr/LP vs. hg/bitbucket and now seeing that in the foreseeable future we cannot expect any progress here , it's easier to decide for us to go via hg/bitbucket route.

> I really am sad to do this, and I really hope this bug gets fixed. It just seems there are too many bugs to fix and not enough people to fix them. Hopefully I have encouraged someone else to fix this bug by now, but if not it will get shoved down to the bottom of the list due to all the other problems has (about 5000 of them).

It's really too bad that LP devs do not see importance of this feature, especially considering that main competitors (github, bitbucket, google, SF) all have it. :-/

Sincerely,
Gour

杨敏 (mandy9337)
Changed in launchpad:
status: In Progress → Invalid
William Grant (wgrant)
Changed in launchpad:
status: Invalid → Triaged
Changed in launchpad:
status: Triaged → New
Changed in launchpad:
status: New → Triaged
Revision history for this message
Alexander Regueiro (alexreg) wrote :

I'd up-vote this proposal if Launchpad Bugs had a feature for voting on issues. ;-)

Revision history for this message
Michael Wayne Goodman (goodmami) wrote :

I'd vote up this issue, but I've pretty much migrated to Google Code and Github, so perhaps I should just unsubscribe from the bug. I'm surprised it wasn't more of a priority. It's been what, almost 3.5 years now?

Revision history for this message
Martin Pool (mbp) wrote :

You can essentially 'vote' on the issue by clicking "this bug affects me."

Revision history for this message
Display Name (user340562791542-deactivatedaccount) wrote :
Download full text (5.7 KiB)

I had an interesting talk with MoinMoin's main developer Thomas Waldmann. In sum, I just think Moin 2 is worth a look, it's a big improvement compared to the 1.x series. But note that it's alpha and it *needs contributors*. As for scaling, it seems it does the trick. Please take a look:

* ThomasWaldmann: btw, storage got the final rewrite a few months ago, now much simpler, very flexible

* RenatoSilva: cool, do you think the code is cleaner and smaller?
* ThomasWaldmann: yes, a lot, old backend storage implementations were about 10x bigger

* RenatoSilva: I've heard some dudes from LP pondering about putting wikis available for projects, they were wondering what wiki engine to use, maybe moin2 if available can make them reconsider this...
* ThomasWaldmann: well, it is not ready yet for production

* RenatoSilva: just found a bazaar-based engine, maybe this one is what they're planning to use: https://launchpad.net/wikkid
* ThomasWaldmann: omg bzr, btw we killed the hg backend we had. we found it is just the wrong approach. But with the stuff we have now, we can sync on top of all those storage layers. this is more generic than doing it in the backend (we don't have the sync code yet, but we have revision ids, parent id, etc.)

* RenatoSilva: some people are suggesting moin, as well as wikkid, but the staff needs to test what wiki they need, iirc someone said moin would not scale well for the thousands of projects hosted there. Do you think moin could scale for thousands of wiki instances?
* ThomasWaldmann: it scales as well as anything else, how much ressources a wiki eats always depends on what you do with it and how. If you do stupid stuff, it will be slow. If you do a lot of expensive stuff, it will be slow also. Dvcs is wrong way to go. we also had that idea, but it just solves a different problem, not the problem a wiki has.

* RenatoSilva: I think the issue here is just a basic wiki instance for each project, the problem is that there would be thousands of wiki instances, so I imagine they wonder if moin server would handle them all well
* ThomasWaldmann: dvcs is great for managing a bunch of project (text) files in the filesystem. Few metadata (file name, mtime), data in file. And all files together define some state of your project. A wiki rather needs revision control for single items. But items do not necessarily need to be stored on the filesystem. Also, you do not just have data, but also lots of metadata (and that idea is no way new, hatta has done that also with hg). But you just can't sanely store wiki revision data into a file.

* RenatoSilva: but what solution do you think for "distributed wiki editing" (basically offline edits and their merges)
* ThomasWaldmann: it would need a enhanced filesystem, with unicode filenames of arbitrary length, with related metadata stored together with the file. Such stuff does not exist (sadly) and even if it would, it would be no way cross-platform. Distributed editing just requires to solve 2 problems: transferring the changes (this is rather easy) and merging (this can be hard and can not be automated for any case), and to know what one needs to do, one simply needs revids and parents

*...

Read more...

Revision history for this message
Kenneth Endfinger (kendfinger-deactivatedaccount) wrote :

We need a wiki for the Ubuntu Geek Squad. I think flexibility is essential. Mediawiki is definitely a no go!!!

Revision history for this message
Kenneth Endfinger (kendfinger-deactivatedaccount) wrote :

The wikkid idea is great. You could mod_proxy the python server on ports to PROJECT.wiki.launchpad.net. Has anybody ever thought of this?

Revision history for this message
Andreas Roehler (a-roehler) wrote :

Please raise the importance flag. Having a reasonable documentation facility IMO is of high importance of such a environment.

thanks,

Andreas

Revision history for this message
Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote :

This is probably mutually exclusive with bug 306378, "Knowledge Base feature". A wiki and a knowledge base aren't the same thing, but it would be overkill to have both.

Revision history for this message
Andreas Roehler (a-roehler) wrote : Re: [Bug 240067] Re: Launchpad projects need wikis

Am 16.05.2013 18:49, schrieb Matthew Paul Thomas:
> This is probably mutually exclusive with bug 306378, "Knowledge Base
> feature". A wiki and a knowledge base aren't the same thing, but it
> would be overkill to have both.
>

suggest to mark 306378 as duplicate of 240067

Also a Wiki is more common nowadays.

Revision history for this message
Jean Daniel Browne (jeandaniel.browne) wrote :

> suggest to mark 306378 as duplicate of 240067
-1

knowledge base is different from a wiki, and a wiki is indeed a knowledge
base.

There is many ways to do a knowledge base, wiki is one option suitable for
many people and use case, and RST/markown based static html stored in a
VCS, like github's jekyll or readthedocs is better suited for other people
and use cases.

Cheers,

On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 7:51 PM, Andreas Roehler
<email address hidden>wrote:

> Am 16.05.2013 18:49, schrieb Matthew Paul Thomas:
> > This is probably mutually exclusive with bug 306378, "Knowledge Base
> > feature". A wiki and a knowledge base aren't the same thing, but it
> > would be overkill to have both.
> >
>
> suggest to mark 306378 as duplicate of 240067
>
> Also a Wiki is more common nowadays.
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to a
> duplicate bug report (476472).
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/240067
>
> Title:
> Launchpad projects need wikis
>
> Status in Launchpad itself:
> Triaged
>
> Bug description:
> Launchpad needs a Wiki unrelated to Ubuntu. When we opened our open
> source project (ubuntu related, in a way) i was uncertain about being
> allowed to use Ubuntu wiki to fill one (1) page about the project.
>
> I really think you should provide a wiki to every project in launchpad
> (maybe with the chance to choose to have an external one).
>
> The rationale is:
> - having an own wiki requires hosting. Why use launchpad for
> bugtracking and buying hosting space just for the wiki ?
> - Ubuntu wiki is inherently unrelated for many of the projects.
> - Launchpad's blueprints require an external site. This shouldn't be
> necessary
>
> To manage notifications about this bug go to:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/240067/+subscriptions
>

--
جان دانيال براون

Revision history for this message
Mehmet Atif Ergun (mehmetaergun) wrote :

Just wanted to let subscribers know that I filed bug #1376166 as a (better?) related feature request.

Revision history for this message
Francewhoa (francewhoa) wrote :

Hi all :) As you know Launchpad haven't yet implemented markup support for tickets or wikis. Any additional volunteers for a patch. The team at Ubertus.org would be happy to contribute testing and documentation.

Meanwhile here is are a few free tools to do some basic text formatting with Launchpad. It works but it is not easy-breezy.

Convert plain text characters to obscure characters from Unicode, then the output is fully cut-n-pastable text to Launchpad at http://www.panix.com/~eli/unicode/convert.cgi?text=Is+Jorge+Castro+a+Robot

Strike text tool at http://adamvarga.com/strike/

Underline text tool at http://thejh.net/misc/unicode-underline

Combined all of the above tools at http://www.panix.com/~eli/unicode/convert.cgi?text=M%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6i%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6c%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6h%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6e%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6a%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6l%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6+%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6H%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6a%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6l%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6l%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6+%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6e%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6a%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6t%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6s%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6+%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6r%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6u%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6b%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6b%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6e%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6r%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6+%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6f%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6o%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6r%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6+%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6s%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6u%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6p%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6p%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6e%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6r%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6+%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6a%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6n%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6d%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6+%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6h%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6a%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6s%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6+%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6c%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6h%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6i%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6c%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6k%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6e%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6n%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6+%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6f%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6o%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6r%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6+%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6t%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6i%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6r%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6e%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6s%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6.%CC%B6%CC%B2%CC%B6

Thanks to Akiva for the tip :)

Revision history for this message
Francewhoa (francewhoa) wrote :

Examples:

s̶t̶r̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶t̶e̶x̶t̶

U̲n̲d̲e̲r̲l̲i̲n̲e̲ ̲t̲e̲x̲t̲

Bold italic strike underline text: 𝙈̶̶̲𝙞̶̶̲𝙘̶̶̲𝙝̶̶̲𝙚̶̶̲𝙖̶̶̲𝙡̶̶̲ ̶̶̲𝙃̶̶̲𝙖̶̶̲𝙡̶̶̲𝙡̶̶̲ ̶̶̲𝙚̶̶̲𝙖̶̶̲𝙩̶̶̲𝙨̶̶̲ ̶̶̲𝙧̶̶̲𝙪̶̶̲𝙗̶̶̲𝙗̶̶̲𝙚̶̶̲𝙧̶̶̲ ̶̶̲𝙛̶̶̲𝙤̶̶̲𝙧̶̶̲ ̶̶̲𝙨̶̶̲𝙪̶̶̲𝙥̶̶̲𝙥̶̶̲𝙚̶̶̲𝙧̶̶̲ ̶̶̲𝙖̶̶̲𝙣̶̶̲𝙙̶̶̲ ̶̶̲𝙝̶̶̲𝙖̶̶̲𝙨̶̶̲ ̶̶̲𝙘̶̶̲𝙝̶̶̲𝙞̶̶̲𝙘̶̶̲𝙠̶̶̲𝙚̶̶̲𝙣̶̶̲ ̶̶̲𝙛̶̶̲𝙤̶̶̲𝙧̶̶̲ ̶̶̲𝙩̶̶̲𝙞̶̶̲𝙧̶̶̲𝙚̶̶̲𝙨̶̶̲.̶̶̲

Jair Gonzalez (jairglez)
description: updated
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