On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 3:30 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2009/1/9 Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu:
I am skeptical of the current development process. That is because it has led to the current parser, which is not a proper parser at all, and
includes
horrifying syntax.
Er, that would be a direct descendant of UseModWiki. That this has been a hair-tearing nightmare ever since is largely because of the huge corpus of text that needs to remain parseable - that doesn't support your argument at all, and calls into question that you even have one.
It would be a potentially acceptable technical solution to change the parser and markup syntax to make it easier to work with, as long as there was an automated conversion tool to shift from what's in the DB now to what would be there going forwards.
Adding in a new parser in parallel and a bit to flag whether a page was in old or new format would make the conversion easy and prevent the necessity for a flag day. Conversion done in semi-automated manner with user review in real time would be a lot safer than having to autoconvert the whole thing at once and deal with the edge cases all at the same time.