[asterisk-dev] documentation to MediaWiki?

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Sun, Mar 09, 2008 at 12:18:40PM -0400, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 09, 2008 at 05:51:32PM +0200, Tzafrir Cohen wrote:
> > On Sun, Mar 09, 2008 at 11:34:41AM -0400, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> > > I'm inclined, at this point, to toss my *next* standard suggestion
> > > against the wall: given the ability to transform wikitext into docbook
> > > sources, why not put the doco in a wiki, with registration required to
> > > edit?
> > 
> > The documentation is for a specific version of Asterisk. When it is
> > maintianed together with Asterisk this is easy to keep. Otherwise you'll
> > have to make it very simple to refer to the relevant version you're
> > talking about.
> 
> This is an excellent point.  There are several ways you could handle
> that, if you were inclined to use MW as an editing engine; which one
> you'd pick depends on how much stuff changes from release to release.
> 
> > But then again, you might have been secretly pushing for ikiwiki all
> > along :-)
> > 
> > http://ikiwiki.info/
> 
> Not even remotely.
> 
> MediaWiki has won the wiki war.  The universe of people who know how to
> use it reasonably fluidly is at least 2 orders of magnitude larger than
> anything else, and maybe 4 or 5 -- I don't really like to throw around
> numbers like that without proof.

If you like it so much, use it. Convert a number of (text / tex) articles 
to it, or write new ones. And use the toolchain you want others to use.

A number of points to note:

# Lists formatting is not as nice. I don't understand how to get lists to span multiple lines. Anything obvious I'm missing?
# I don't fully understand how the intend to handle documents that span multiple articles. Can you include one document into another?
# I can't fine a simple way to just include verbatim text.

Debian seems to have the package libtext-wikiformat-perl, but I can't
figure how to make it work:

  $ perl -MText::WikiFormat -e 'print Text::WikiFormat::format("* hi\n\n* bi")'
  <p>* hi</p>
  <p>* bi</p>

Err... wikimedia insists on showing that as one indented/verbatim
paragraph and two bullets.

It will also insist on rendering text in the "verbatim" text. At least
lists and URLs.

So unless you prove me wrong by actually using using wikimedia wikitext
sytax in a useful way, I vote against it.

-- 
               Tzafrir Cohen
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