[Foundation-l] Why is the software out of reach of the community?

[George Herbert]

On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 3:30 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2009/1/9 Brian <Brian.Mingus at 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.



-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com