Re: [Caml-list] OCaml wiki

[Ashish Agarwal <agarwal1975@gmail.com>]

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On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 8:05 AM, Wojciech Meyer <wojciech.meyer@gmail.com>wrote:

The bottleneck I see that the changes needs to be "formally approved"
>

This is currently required because the ocaml.org repo contains code, which
is run hourly on a server (formerly at OCamlPro, now at NYU, soon at OCaml
Labs). Giving too many people direct push permission would be a security
risk. Nonetheless, this can easily be resolved. We can have a separate repo
for pure text contributions, and the ocaml.org code could pull from that
one at publish time.


My answer would be as lightweight as possible, oddmuse is perl, mediawiki
> is php.
>

I'd go even lighter. So far the idea I like best is using github. We could
create a new repo ocaml.org-wiki, in which we use just the wiki feature.
This provides pure text files which can be manipulated to generate nice
output however we want. We can give push permission to everyone who
requests it.

Before committing to this, I'd like to know if something like 99 Problems
(solved) in OCaml <http://ocaml.org/tutorials/99problems.html> could be
supportable in a wiki (not just in theory, but realistically what work does
it take)? Note it has images, icons to indicate the difficulty level, code
that is auto-run through OCaml's toploop library, clickable boxes that
show/hide the solution, and an auto-generated table of contents. All of
these little details add up to making the page nice. A plain text version
of this would be lame. Ideally, the tutorials, which are currently plain
text, could also include more rich content like this.



> Also these are wiki engines, so we probably don't need to hack on it.
>

Various hacking ends up being required. If you want to style the wiki
content, you might have to change the attributes on the html elements, or
something. Maybe someday we want to ocaml.org to have user accounts for
some other reason, and at that point it would be nice to make the wiki
login system integrate with these other services. Maybe the wiki has an SSO
capability that works perfectly, but maybe you end up having to read php
code.


So no need to worry that we need to get dirty with php :)
>

It does scare me!



> I also think ocsigen with ocsimore would be cool to have at some point


I'm enticed by this a lot! The trick is to start this on some sub-component
of the website without disrupting the current work flow. Pick a particular
feature that would benefit from the rich dynamic capabilities ocsigen
enables, implement that in a separate repo, show the code works, is
maintainable, and then it can be integrated into ocaml.org.


We could have at least a static webpage generator like Stog
>

That's what we have, but we are using Christophe Troestler's Weberizer.

We should keep in mind all of the above is asking a lot from various
people. Having an ocsigen backend means we are asking OCaml Labs to provide
a server with ocsigen installed. Using the github wiki syntax to html
converter, or weberizer, or stog means asking their respective authors to
do work when the tools don't do exactly what is needed. Converting the
current tutorials to wiki syntax will take hours, after hours were already
spent converting them into html. But hey... a little peer pressure to get a
better website is worth it.  :)

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