Comment 72 for bug 240067

Robert, thanks for sharing your answers on this issue.

What about the proposition to have a conventional directory named say
<project>.launchpad.com at the root of a source depot, that the users
can fill with static html/javascript content with bzr push? and
launchpad would be expected to serve this content at
http://<project>.launchpad.com. I believe serving static content has a
much lesser impact on the infrastructure and scales better. Also, the
user can choose among many tools, such as Sphinx to create ans skins
his site.

The documentation of Python with Sphinx is truly impressive and this
is partly due to the powerful tools they can use on a local tree of
directory (emacs, bzr merge, grep, sed, etc ...) which is unavailable
to the wikis software.

Best regards,

Jean-Daniel Browne

On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 1:08 AM, Robert Collins
<email address hidden> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 11:56 AM, Geoff <email address hidden> wrote:
>> Seems is would be the most simple to just copy the code that powers
>> dev.launchpad.net over to wiki.launchpad.net and then adapt it for many
>> projects, change the CSS, and you would have a working wiki. Anything is
>> better than nothing.
>
> The devil is in the details; the constraints we need to match are:
>  - scaling : we have 30K projects and growing, plus distributions.
> This is a substantial collection of wikis to run, and most traditional
> wiki software (like moin) is not geared for this sort of volume.
>  - security : spam is a massive problem on dev.launchpad.net (until we
> locked it down) so some lockdown is needed per project
>  - provisioning : dev.launchpad.net is manually maintained, and we
> cannot afford to provision 30K projects by hand, including renames
>
> Projects that just 'need a wiki' can easily create one on wikispaces,
> wikidot, googlesites - theres no value in Launchpad doing a half baked
> wiki environment when there are solid ones already available which
> projects hosted on Launchpad can use. We have a link you can fill in
> to where the wiki is.
>
> We will eventually do a good wiki implementation, and I share your
> enthusiasm for it, but doing it badly will simply put us into catchup
> mode where we are chasing problems for several years : we need to
> allocate the resources to do it well, and then do it well. Right now,
> our resources are committed to other things which are more important.
>
> If you wanted to work on this yourself, I'd be delighted to put enough
> time in to help you draft a LEP, but I estimate you'd be facing
> between 80 and 120 man-hours of work for an experienced LP developer :
> its not a trivial undertaking, and I wouldn't want you to think it was
> easily doable in weekends and evenings.
>
> -Rob
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of a duplicate bug (476472).
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/240067
>
> Title:
>  Launchpad projects need wikis
>
> Status in Launchpad itself:
>  Triaged
>
> Bug description:
>  Launchpad needs a Wiki unrelated to Ubuntu. When we opened our open
>  source project (ubuntu related, in a way) i was uncertain about being
>  allowed to use Ubuntu wiki to fill one (1) page about the project.
>
>  I really think you should provide a wiki to every project in launchpad
>  (maybe with the chance to choose to have an external one).
>
>  The rationale is:
>   - having an own wiki requires hosting. Why use launchpad for bugtracking and buying hosting space just for the wiki ?
>   - Ubuntu wiki is inherently unrelated for many of the projects.
>   - Launchpad's blueprints require an external site. This shouldn't be necessary
>
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>