Re: Wiki migration -- redirect from old wiki

On Mon, Jun 25, 2018 at 6:04 PM, Julian Foad <julianfoad_at_apache.org> wrote:
> Johan Corveleyn wrote on 2018-04-22 in "Re: Wiki migration complete -- new wiki is now live":
>> Nathan Hartman wrote:
>>> While the old wiki remains online I think there should be a big yellow box informing
>>> users that this is old and superseded by the new Confluence wiki.
>>
>> Yes. Actually we're planning to put redirects on the old pages to the
>> corresponding pages on the new wiki (so old incoming links still
>> work).
>
> I have just updated the existing Subversion site nav menu and web pages to point to the new wiki.

Thanks! I intended to continue those wiki migration bits, but I don't
seem to find any significant cycles anymore these days. So thanks for
picking this up.

> Now, as a minimum we need to redirect from
>
> https://wiki.apache.org/subversion/PAGE[#FRAGMENT]
>
> to
>
> https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/SVN/PAGE[#FRAGMENT]
>
> Johan: what is the recipe/regex for converting PAGE[#FRAGMENT]? The PAGE part seems to be unchanged, at least in simple cases.

Yes indeed, the PAGE part is unchanged. However, since pages can (and
will) be renamed on the new wiki (for example, you already renamed
"FrontPage" to "Apache Subversion Wiki"), those page names aren't
stable. I think we should redirect the old pages to the "Tiny link" of
the new pages (which are in fact stable [1]).

> How/where do we configure a redirect from the wiki.a.o subdomain? Ask infra?

I don't think we can automate / script this, because of the need to
use those "tiny links" as target. We're only talking about ~100 pages,
so my idea was to just do this manually: edit each page and change the
content into "#REDIRECT <newurl>". That would even maintain the
original history in the MoinMoin wiki (until it gets deleted someday).

As for the #FRAGMENT: that's more difficult. I think #fragments that
originate from actual "anchors" that were put manually on the page
work fine (i.e. are the same on the new wiki). But the way anchors are
automatically generated for "headings" is vastly different between the
two wiki's. At least as soon as spaces or special characters are used.

This can be seen when going over the links in the TableOfContents for
pages that have them. For instance, compare

    https://wiki.apache.org/subversion/InheritedProperties

to

    https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/SVN/InheritedProperties

For example, for the section "What's This?" the anchor becomes
#What.27s_This.3F on MoinMoin, and #InheritedProperties-What'sThis? on
Confluence.

It's annoying that auto-generated anchors on Confluence also contain
the page name (which isn't stable).

Unless someone has a really good idea on how to solve this in an
elegant way, I would just ignore supporting the "old fragments" in old
links. We'll redirect the user to the correct page, but we can't guide
him to the correct section ... too bad.

> I see we already have some redirects from subversion.a.o/... configured in site/publish/.htaccess; I have just updated this one:
>
> - Redirect /wiki http://wiki.apache.org/subversion
> + Redirect /wiki https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/SVN

Great.

> So far we're just talking about simple redirects. It would be a whole step better if we could publish the new Wiki's pages as an overlay onto Subversion's own top-level URL namespace:
>
> https://subversion.apache.org/<PAGE>
>
> From a site design or information design perspective that presents a much better joined-up site, and changing the back-end from MoinMoin to Confluence or to/from plain HTML wouldn't force us to change the URLs in our web pages and source code and docs. Also, much of our web-page material would be easier to maintain using the wiki's editor than as raw HTML.
>
> Any idea where to start with that?

I'm not sure if that's a good idea. Making the wiki pages available
through url's that are part of our top-level namespace, yes, perhaps.
But putting the entire website in the wiki? Feels a bit weird to me,
except perhaps for some specific pages (like the faq) ... though I'm
not a website designer, so I may be wrong. Can't really put my finger
on it, but I believe for the webpages themselves you might need more
flexibility than what you get inside the wiki.

Maybe those ideas should be bounced off of some infra people, or
people in other ASF communities.

[1] https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/Are-Confluence-s-tiny-links-shortened-URLs-static/qaq-p/69346

-- 
Johan