Re: moving to a git-backed wiki

On 02/02/2011 01:55 AM, Vincent Hanquez wrote:

 On 01/02/11 22:48, J.H. wrote:

quoted

The wiki will almost universally have a "central site" no matter what
the backend.  Personally I see little advantage to having a git backed
wiki myself.

with git based wiki, you can clone the whole wiki on your local machine,
and read/edit/commit on it locally using standard editor tool (i.e.
$EDITOR). and the history/revision/diff is completely built-in.

That would be fine for things like source code or documentation, but you
end up with a single person who would need to merge / push things to a
central location, a-la git.wiki.kernel.org.  You are now taking
something, that is already editable by anyone, and making it only
editable by a single person.

You also have a scalability problem.  Git is *VERY* memory and i/o
intensive.  While you basically have a cache of data that is static (the
basic pages you are viewing) things like the history, edits, etc can be
quite expensive to generate.

Think about a site, we'll use git.wiki.kernel.org, where it's not
running on a single machine, but a cluster of machines (how many web
infrastructures, including git.wiki.kernel.org run) and now you have a
problem of an edit happens and commits on node3, a different conflicting
edit happens on node9 and when those try to merge - you get conflicts.

Let me be clear here, I think the idea is interesting, but I think in
trying to replace a full wiki it's a horrible idea, particularly since
you are pushing a lot of manual work - somewhere, and trying to use git
as a nosql database without some sort of locking system.

Just my $0.02 though.

- John 'Warthog9' Hawley