[R-wiki] Summary of the discussion before creation of R-sig-wiki

[Detlef Steuer]

I vote for "who does the work has the saying" :-)

DocuWiki has no definite drawbacks and Phillipe seems to like it more.
Let`s use it. Additionally it is text file driven. _If_ it ever seem 
unavoidable to change the engine that can be done.

We should settle the engine discussion and try to concentrate on a
feature set which would define Rwiki-1.0 .

One thing I like a lot is the discussion plug-in for DocuWiki proposed
earlier today. Combine this with help pages for all functions and the
possibility to cut`n`paste code. Will be a powerful beast!

Detlef


On Thu, 19 Jan 2006 20:38:32 +0100
Philippe Grosjean <phgrosjean at sciviews.org> wrote:

> Frank E Harrell Jr wrote:
> > [...]
> 
> 
> > Nice discussion Philippe, again.  Here are 3 points I'd like to
> > make.
> > 
> > - I would not weight installation very much as you don't do it often
> > and  users don't see this
> 
> I agree. It is just that I anticipate some people would like to
> install  a local version of a part or whole of the R Wiki on their
> computer (for  consultation of the documentation when not connected to
> the Internet).  With DokuWiki, I did this by just unzipping \wiki
> somewhere in the \www  directory. Even under Windows, it works with a
> plain installation of  EasyPHP. I wonder if it can ever be that simple
> with TWiki.
> 
> > - Twiki stores only diffs so there is no explosion of disk space
> 
> ??? What is the algorithm used for images? What is the CPU load to 
> reconstruct pages from several diffs... or images from diffs?
> 
> I just check in DokuWiki. Everything is in \data.
> Here is the content:
> 
> \data\pages are the latest wiki pages in clear (UTF-8 encoded plain 
> text). The directory structure reflects the namespaces.
> 
> \data\media are images.
> 
> \data\attic stores successive versions of documents in gzipped
> formats.  This is not diffs, it is really all versions of the
> documents.
> 
> \data\cache stores both xhtml cached versions of wiki pages (they are 
> recalculated only if modified) and a special .i file that indexes
> words  for rapid search.
> 
> \data\meta just stores [pages].indexed for all pages whose indexation
> is  up-to-date.
> 
> Finally, \data\changes.log is a chronological list of page changes.
> Personnally, I trust this because it is simple, and I can manage and 
> hack this easily if needed. Also, it seems that performances are 
> considered, i.e., page cache and indexation of words for fast search.
> 
> > - We base our whole department's web site on Twiki and it has been 
> > extremely successful and free of software problems.  We have also
> > had  great success adding plugins when we need them such as
> > bibliographer  builders.
> 
> OK, so, I am convinced that it is a good Wiki engine. But I still
> wonder  about performances for large Wikis. A priori, I tend to trust
> MediaWiki  in this field, because it is the Wikipedia engine, and it
> runs smoothly  with millions of Wiki pages!... But then, I read this: 
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/DokuWiki_vs_MediaWiki_benchmarks. Gosh!
>  This benchmark is from Wikimedia itself! So, when they say DokuWiki
>  is 
> faster than MediaWiki, I trust them!
> 
> Do you think we could set up Twiki and DokuWiki together on the same 
> server for comparison with a few hundreds of pages (for instance,
> those  we could get from .Rd files, once Rdconv will be modified to
> produce  Wiki pages)? Could you make this test if I send you a
> complete DokuWiki  install with (the simples) instructions to run it?
> 
> Best,
> 
> Philippe
> 
> P.S.: at the end of comparison between DokuWiki and TWiki at: 
> http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki%3Acompare, you have:
> 
> "... But one of the ___features___ that I like so much in DokuWiki is
> the  fact that is able to offer a wide/complete set of features in a
> small  code footprint and looks nice (visually uncluttered). This, of
> course,  is very subjective and is no technical advantage unless the
> code is done  by following high quality practices." ___  Straider
> 2005-02-24 12:15
> 
> and:
> 
> "I really don___t feel Twiki___s setup merits the rating of ___Easy___"
> 
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