----- Original Message -----
From: "Brion Vibber" brion@pobox.com
On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 3:32 PM, Jay Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
Github has a wiki based on git as part of the package it supplies to its subscribers. I've been working with it a bit, writing and expanding the doco for the K-9 android email client, and I'm *incredibly* unhappy with it; it violates the Principle of Least Astonishment in so many, many different ways.
I think that's more to do with their implementation & UI than the actual storage; git should in fact be a very nice, flexible backend for something like a wiki. I've actually been thinking about ways to use git or git-like storage for a multi-user wiki-like environment, and may end up exploring that in some side projects.
I know. I guess I just felt like beating them up a bit for making me look foolish while trying to help out on a project whose lead developer I'm not a favorite person of in the first place.
Or I'm just a Mediawiki partisan, more likely, cause we've already gone through all the design pain to get to a place where we've got all the important stuff in our code (that Github's doesn't).
One notable feature (which apparently doesn't work the way you'd think) is that the wikitext parser *is selectable on a page by page basis*.
Of course, it's possible to change that on a page that's already got a bunch of text in it, and *no*, it doesn't store a parse tree and give it to you in the format you'd like, as that makes you expect... it just changes the parser for the page, but not the text.
Breaking it.
For everyone.
Baaaad programmers. :-}
Cheers, -- jra