phpwiki-talk

[Phpwiki-talk] Situation update

[Matti A. <ma...@ik...>]

Hi, folks.

I had to put PhpWiki a bit on the backburner for a while to make the 
last struggle to finish my Master's. Now that it's done (and I've had a 
few days of well-earned do-nothing relaxation), I'm ready to catch up on 
PhpWiki development.

Going through my mailing-list backlog I noticed that Martin Geisler had 
already included my new TextFormattingRules. That's great! However, I 
suspect there will be a big hassle if the old formatting rules are no 
longer anywhere to be found. Would it be OK to rename the old 
TextFormattingRules to (obviously!) OldTextFormattingRules and use the 
DHTML gimmick I made to provide the synopsis for either version? If so, 
I can make a patch for that.

Are there any plans for the next PhpWiki release? It's been a while even 
since the previous development branch release... How about fixing the 
worst outstanding bugs, updating documentation and releasing a new 
intermediate development release? And while at it, I'd love to see Joby 
Walker's new config scheme to be officially adopted - it's so much 
clearer than the one in use at the moment.

I can participate in updating the documentation (and other stuff as 
well, although they may not be that obvious to me).

Cheers,

mairas

Re: [Phpwiki-talk] Situation update

[Steve W. <sw...@pa...>]

On Sat, 14 Dec 2002, Matti Airas wrote:

> Are there any plans for the next PhpWiki release? It's been a while even
> since the previous development branch release... How about fixing the
> worst outstanding bugs, updating documentation and releasing a new
> intermediate development release? And while at it, I'd love to see Joby
> Walker's new config scheme to be officially adopted - it's so much
> clearer than the one in use at the moment.
>
> I can participate in updating the documentation (and other stuff as
> well, although they may not be that obvious to me).

I'm ready to do the work needed to do the actual release -- the press
release, the tarball uploaded to SourceForge, posting to Freshmeat, all
that stuff. I can download and test a fresh tarball from the nightly build
and make sure the casual user should be able to install it with no
problems, on dbm and MySQL at least.

This will be a few hour's work, but I can't do it until commits are in and
people give me the nod. I'll start work on editing down the ChangeLog into
a new feature list, and post it here.

Jeff said a long time ago that we should have frequent releases, and I
think I have an idea on how to make that happen (less fanfare, just upload
the tarball and that's that).

~swain


---
                  http://www.panix.com/~swain/
"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring
production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
                     -- Frank Zappa

Re: [Phpwiki-talk] Situation update

[<la...@us...>]

Fine with me.  I am afraid that the bits I have been working on will not be 
finished for a while, as I have spent the last couple of weeks in bed 
with 'flu, so don't wait for anything from me.

The only change I would be tempted to make before release is a cosmetic one - 
change the "Use new markup" checkbox to "Use old markup" checkbox, and clear it 
by default.  I don't have the access here to be able to do that though, so if 
others agree, please could someone check it in?

I agree with Jeff that we should release more often.

I am a bit confused now as to the purpose of the test wiki, the demo wiki, the 
newmarkup wiki etc.  I think that the current cvs version (ie the forthcomng 
release ;-)) is stable enough to be used on the SF site.

Lawrence
Quoting Steve Wainstead <sw...@pa...>:

> On Sat, 14 Dec 2002, Matti Airas wrote:
> 
> > Are there any plans for the next PhpWiki release? It's been a while
> even
> > since the previous development branch release... How about fixing the
> > worst outstanding bugs, updating documentation and releasing a new
> > intermediate development release? And while at it, I'd love to see
> Joby
> > Walker's new config scheme to be officially adopted - it's so much
> > clearer than the one in use at the moment.
> >
> > I can participate in updating the documentation (and other stuff as
> > well, although they may not be that obvious to me).
> 
> I'm ready to do the work needed to do the actual release -- the press
> release, the tarball uploaded to SourceForge, posting to Freshmeat, all
> that stuff. I can download and test a fresh tarball from the nightly
> build
> and make sure the casual user should be able to install it with no
> problems, on dbm and MySQL at least.
> 
> This will be a few hour's work, but I can't do it until commits are in
> and
> people give me the nod. I'll start work on editing down the ChangeLog
> into
> a new feature list, and post it here.
> 
> Jeff said a long time ago that we should have frequent releases, and I
> think I have an idea on how to make that happen (less fanfare, just
> upload
> the tarball and that's that).
> 
> ~swain
> 
> 
> ---
>                   http://www.panix.com/~swain/
> "Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring
> production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
>                      -- Frank Zappa
> 
> 
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Re: [Phpwiki-talk] Situation update

[Carsten K. <car...@us...>]

I'll agree with Lawrence's suggestions to use "Use old markup" and 
upgrade the main PhpWiki site.

Which one is Joby Walker's config scheme, is that the one with 
config-dist.php, config-user.php etc.? I like that system too... (the 
configurator & old index.php are so huge now and getting tough to 
maintain.)

ck

On Monday, December 16, 2002, at 06:54  am, 
<la...@us...> wrote:

> Fine with me.  I am afraid that the bits I have been working on will 
> not be
> finished for a while, as I have spent the last couple of weeks in bed
> with 'flu, so don't wait for anything from me.
>
> The only change I would be tempted to make before release is a 
> cosmetic one -
> change the "Use new markup" checkbox to "Use old markup" checkbox, and 
> clear it
> by default.  I don't have the access here to be able to do that 
> though, so if
> others agree, please could someone check it in?
>
> I agree with Jeff that we should release more often.
>
> I am a bit confused now as to the purpose of the test wiki, the demo 
> wiki, the
> newmarkup wiki etc.  I think that the current cvs version (ie the 
> forthcomng
> release ;-)) is stable enough to be used on the SF site.
>
> Lawrence
>
-- 
Carsten Klapp
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GE d-@+ s+:- a C+++@(---) UB+++ P+>++ L+>++ E>++ W-(++) N-(+) o? K? 
!w----
O M+(++) V? PS+ PE-(--) Y+ PGP+>++ t+@ 5 X+@ R tv+(-) b+ DI++ D-
G e(+) h(---) r y z?
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

Re: [Phpwiki-talk] Situation update

[Matti A. <ma...@ik...>]

Carsten Klapp wrote:

> Which one is Joby Walker's config scheme, is that the one with 
> config-dist.php, config-user.php etc.? I like that system too... (the 
> configurator & old index.php are so huge now and getting tough to 
> maintain.)

Yes, that's the one. However, I have to take my words back slightly. 
IMHO the current implementation is not quite there yet. I found out 
there is *more* work in using the split configuration files at the 
moment. To know what to edit, one has to read config-dist.php, and copy 
the relevant parts from that file to config-user.php (and also be able 
to do basic PHP editing, such as to remove "if (!defined(...)) pieces). 
Furthermore, there are plenty of associative arrays used in the 
configuration files, and it may not be obvious to everyone how to 
override settings from within them.

Maybe all user-editable configuration parameters should be simple 
variables, and the comments should reside in config-user.php. After 
requiring both of these config-files, there could be a 
lib/config-parser.php, which would then parse the set configuration for 
correctness and mangle it to structures more suitable for internal use. 
Or something...

m.

RE: [Phpwiki-talk] Situation update - Setup Diagnostics

[Giovanni M. <Gio...@re...>]

Hi All

> Carsten Klapp wrote:
> 
> > Which one is Joby Walker's config scheme, is that the one with 
> > config-dist.php, config-user.php etc.? I like that system 
> too... (the configurator & old index.php are so huge now and 
> getting tough to maintain.)

Relating to PHPWiki configuration, I'd like to put in a plea for some
setup diagnostics. These would be relatively straightforward to
implement but save days of time if you make errors.

I'm thinking of a "Debug-directories" variable which will print out all
File system and URL paths. I had MAJOR difficulty setting up PHPWiki
1.3.3 on an IIS server (a prior Apache setup was trivial) because I was
confused about whether the directory names should be D:\\home\\xxxx or
D:/home/xxxx and where the paths are partial, whether or not there
should be trailing slashes ... and what the USE_PATH_INFO variable did
or was used for.

Eventually it turned to be that the "USE_PATH_INFO" wouldn't work (on
our IIS setup), setting this to false and it all worked, but it took
days to narrow it down ...

All of this sounds trivial **IF** you know/understand the setup
documentation. I'd set up all the directories (I thought) correctly and
yet it couldn't find the files - but I could see them in the directory I
THOUGHT I'd specified. Obviously it was either looking somewhere else or
the permissions were wrong but finding out which was extremely
difficult.

PHPWiki is now so complex that it's seriously non-trivial to figure out
what's going on.

So how about a switch that:

 1) print out all final paths defined in the Config files
    - especially important if a path has been assembled out 
    of several partial parts

 2) Write test file to each directory that should be writable. 
    This is to validate that the permissions are OK.

Point 2 was a killer recently - I was starting to write an Image
uploader for PHP (yes I know some exist) and the file upload just hung.
It turned out that the PHP upload temp directory wasn't writable but
phpinfo() looked fine, nothing complained, it just hung. As I was
unfamiliar with handling file uploads, it took a while to figure out it
wasn't my scripting/html.

The point of all this is that the simplest of errors can be quite
difficult to diagnose if you're working with incomplete
information/understanding. Some Diagnostics up front can be VERY
helpful.

phpInfo() is invaluable when getting PHP going, how about a "status
dump" for PHPWiki?

What do you think?
Giovanni

Re: [Phpwiki-talk] Situation update

[Matti A. <ma...@ik...>]

la...@us... wrote:

> The only change I would be tempted to make before release is a cosmetic one - 
> change the "Use new markup" checkbox to "Use old markup" checkbox, and clear it 
> by default.  I don't have the access here to be able to do that though, so if 
> others agree, please could someone check it in?

I can do that today or tomorrow. I'm anyway about to make a patch to put 
the back the old text formatting rules and enable my DHTML thingy in the 
edit screen (if that's still ok), so I can do that as well. Not that big 
change anyway. ;-)

Cheers,

m.