[developers] migration of collaboration infrastructure

[Stephan Oepen]

dear colleagues,

> over the next two weeks, services hosted in the following domains will be migrated to a new system at the university of oslo:
>
> + delph-in.net

[...]

the bulk of the service migration is now complete, and there is both
good news and bad news.  i would like to invite everyone to take a
critical look and let me know if you find anything missing (please
recall that the WeSearch semantic query interface has been
discontinued).

in particular, moving the DELPH-IN wiki turned out more involved than
anticipated.  for the time being, the wiki is read-only, and (truth be
told) i am not sure i will be able to re-enable edit functionality.

on the technical side (owing to a dependency on Python 2.x), we had to
convert from running in the WSGI framework to a more traditional CGI
set-up, which means that URLs in the new wiki now require an extra
path component, e.g.

http://moin.delph-in.net/FrontPage --> http://moin.delph-in.net/wiki/FrontPage

old-style URLs will be automatically rewritten by the server, so in
principle the above should not cause any broken links.  content-wise,
as part of the migration, we holiday-cleaned some 12,538 wiki accounts
and 33,481 spam pages.  this was done heuristically, but i hope no
genuine content has been lost.

to regain a fully functional DELPH-IN wiki, i would like to urgently
ask for help: i believe we should either find another site to host and
maintain a fresh MoinMoin instance (preferably with WSGI support) or
migrate the wiki content (and, ideally, user accounts and revision
history) into a more modern platform.  regarding the latter, i imagine
either MediaWiki or GitHub wikis would be strong candidates (and could
presumably be hosted on the public M$ GitHub service).

now that we are down to a manageable number of pages and users in the
DELPH-IN MoinMoin instance, i believe the migration task should not be
insurmountable.  i will be happy to provide an archive of all content
and revision history.  i sincerely hope we can find volunteers in the
DELPH-IN community to pick up the ball and work toward a modern and
sustainable DELPH-IN wiki?

best wishes, oe