Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Installing a moin wiki

I opened #1637. This wiki would be used as a service for our customers so that we can help them with the task of maintaining a user manual(s). Concretely I think about Monique for Voga and Tanel for Vilma. And also two sections for ourselves: a Jane user guide and our “Internal Howto” (about server administration). This latter one should be readable only for authenticated users so that it can contain more sensible information about the servers maintained by us.

First question : which Wiki engine to use? WikiMedia should be the first choice because everybody knows how to use it. But it is written in PHP. Isn’t there anythin in Python? Yes, it seems that MoinMoin is the leader there.

I think we should use the new 2.0 branch (installation instructions) despite the fact that “no migration tool has been developed to migrate data between moin2 versions. In its current alpha state, there may be code changes that impact the structure of the wiki data or indexes. Should this occur, you must start over with an empty wiki and somehow copy and paste the contents of all the old wiki items into the new wiki. While no such changes are planned, they have happened in the past and may happen in the future.”

First we need mercurial:

$ sudo apt install mercurial

Note that our directory lino_sites (in /usr/local/python/ should theoretically get renamed to wsgi_sites. We are probably never going to do this because it is only our own site and because it would be quite some work.

Create a project directory and install moin:

$ cd /usr/local/python/lino_sites
$ mkdir moin
$ cd moin
$ hg clone http://hg.moinmo.in/moin/2.0 moin-2.0
$ cd moin-2.0
$ python quickinstall.py ../env
...
449 successfully created or updated venv at /usr/local/python/lino_sites/moin/env

Create a new wiki:

$ go moin
$ cd moin-2.0
$ ./m sample
Creating a new wiki populated with sample data...
Output messages redirected to m-new-wiki.txt.

Success: a new wiki has been created.

Then I created a file wikiconfig_local.py in my clone of the moin repo:

from wikiconfig import *
class LocalConfig(Config):
    configuration_item_1 = 'value1'  # overlay this with local customizations
MOINCFG = LocalConfig
SECRET_KEY = 'My secret key'
DEBUG = True

Now I read the instructions on https://moin-20.readthedocs.io/en/latest/admin/serve.html and created a file /usr/local/python/lino_sites/moin/wsgi.py for the apache config:

from MoinMoin.app import create_app
application = create_app('/usr/local/python/moin/moin-2.0/wikiconfig_local.py')

And in my Apache config there must be comething like:

WSGIScriptAlias / /usr/local/python/moin/wsgi.py
WSGIDaemonProcess jane threads=15 python-path=/usr/local/python/moin/moin-2.0-venv-python/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages
WSGIProcessGroup moin

My next step is how to create a new subdomain (including a https version) using certbot.

$ cd /etc/apache2/sites-available/

Release@vilma

I upgraded vilma because I wanted to activate the courses workflow.

What is a field visit?

I created two milestones mailbox@jane (author Tonis) and ext3to6@jane (author Hamza). Both milestones are meant as what I call a field visit when working with my clients. A field visit (Baustellenbesichtigung, visite de chantier) is a meeting with me as the developer and the contact person of the client. A field visit is not a demo, we both know that the work is not finished. During a field visit we review together the work that has been done (i.e. I show it to the client), and at the same time I collect new items that need to be fixed. So after a field visit I usually have a new list of items to do.

The developer is responsible for deciding when it is time for a field visit. A field visit makes sense only when the developer has “finished” his to-do list of the last visit. This does not necessarily mean that every problem is fixed. It may simply mean that I need some feedback because have some more questions, that I am stuck, that I am unsure about how important that problem is…

For these two milestones mailbox@jane and ext3to6@jane I imagine that I am the “client” and Tonis (or Hamza) is the developer. Hamza and Tonis, so I ask you to decide when it is time for this visit and to invite me then. The milestone reminds you know that I am waiting for them.

Avanti goes on

I finally calmed down and can do some actual work: My tasklist for #1621 had been waiting since last Thursday.

Side effects:

  • There was a bug in lino_xl.lib.contacts.models.Partner.get_as_user() which caused it to mix up partner and partner_ptr.

  • lino.utils.mldbc.fields.BabelVirtualField

DONE:

  • Folgende Felder sollen nicht sichtbar sein für Janina (d.h. lino_avanti.lib.avanti.AllClients): NISS, Enrolment.pupil (Klient), Enrolments *

  • Die drei Felder (Wartezeit, Datum Arbeit) aus Lebenslauf können weg, dafür neues Auswahlfeld “Berufliche Situation”:

    Student Arbeitslos Eingeschrieben (Arbeitsamt) Angestellt Selbstständig

  • Feldbezeichnung “Sprache” -> “Kontaktsprache”

I committed to master without adapting the test suites because things seem to work and I wanted a commit (and because I am too lazy to create a new branch in 5 repositories..).