[cgiapp] Future of the wiki

[Joshua Miller]

I'm usually a lurker, but thought this was an interesting topic in a
more ways than just "let's make the website look nice". So anyway...

On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 5:39 PM, Mark Fuller <azfuller at gmail.com> wrote:
> Even in the most contradictory case of a forum (or wiki) site using a
> different forum (or wiki), I think that could be justified if the
> forum (or wiki) hasn't reached the desired state of development. Using
> something better to facilitate that development seems like a mature
> position. Not necessarily discrediting. (IMO.).

gcc compiles itself.
cvs manages version control of it's own sourcecode.
svn, same.
git, same.
etc.

Self-hosting is not necessary. I'm sure CVS might be able to benefit
from the additional features that svn or git or etc have. And "using
the best tool for the job" is a common and widespread belief that's
difficult to disagree with, but also a frustrating position because
there's more to "best" than features and how widely used it currently
is. Should CVS bite the bullet and start using a modern version
control system? Or git use CVS because it's by far the most widely
used? Or all of them use Visual Source Safe because it has a huge
company doing commercial support (hehehe)?

It's about eating your own dog food. When you force yourself to do
that (ex. use the inhouse trouble ticket system you maintain to track
your own bugs and issues), you end up making a better product in the
meantime, and focusing on the strengths of that product. And if you
can be happy using the product you're trying to get others to use,
it's easier to sell, and they're more likely to be happy with it as
well.

As far as a Wiki for CgiApp, based on the audience I've seen on this
list, I'm betting a version control repo holding the site would be
sufficient. Certainly not the best long term solution, and it wouldn't
encourage community input, but it would give us version control, the
ability to make a pretty site, authentication/authorization controls,
zero spam, and something more people from this group could actively
contribute to. Copy/paste into a wiki when that get's settled :-)

I think a simple, clean wiki and/or forum done in cgiapp would be a
wonderful thing. As a developer using this set of tools to make
things, I wouldn't even want a wiki/or/forum that already has all the
bells and whistles and every feature under the sun... I'd want a clean
architecture from which I could customize and build more task-specific
solutions (that sentence sounds awful...). I like CgiApp because it
does a great job and stays out of the way; if the community provided
source to a wiki based on it, I'd hope it would have similar goals.
It's been a while since I've looked at the code to some of the more
popular forums and wiki's (mostly php based), but the code hurt my
eyes. I'd sacrifice features in a heartbeat for one that was clean,
easy to extend, and written in perl.

(I'm not seriously suggesting CgiApp use a version control system in
place of a wiki. But i think it points out the level of features we
"need", and a simple wiki would likely do the job just fine, while
letting us grow a better product. I'm not on here much though, so
count my vote for a quarter vote or something)

disclaimer - I'm biased towards perl, and won't touch php with a 10'
keyboard cable
--
Josh I.