Twiki | DistributedInformation

Sep 25 2008

Open source culture clash

Tag: enterprise, open source, twiki — Sven Dowideit @ 8:25 pm

Larry Augustin talks about the difference in how open source is selected and perceived between the US and Europe - roughly boiling down to:

US companies see Open source as a free ride they can take to getting their millions, whereas Europeans see Open source as a way to reduce risk, and localise expertise.

In many things Australia follows the US examples - but with their economy imploding due to criminally negligent stupidity, and the Australian government contemplating a 50% tax rebate for companies that work on open source - perhaps things are looking up here.

The TWiki.org open source project has a governance crisis for exactly this mismatch reason. The main code contributors for the last 5 years have been, well, me and Crawford Currie - both of us with very European ideals for the project, and most of the users and other contributors feel the same way. Then, last year, Peter, the project founder found some angel funding to build a startup to capitalize on his ownership of the trademark - very much in the US open source way.

This isn’t being handled cleverly enough PR wise - most likely because the ‘US’ open source style companies aren’t even aware that they are behind.

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Sep 08 2008

TWiki Summit 2008Q3 in Berlin

Tag: twiki, wiki — Sven Dowideit @ 8:30 pm

I wasn’t able to travel from Sydney, Australia to Berlin for this summit - which means I’ve missed all 3 of them so far :(.

I was able to listen in on the conference calls made for the governance discussions, and was quite amazed at the strong commonality in the communities approaches and desires. I guess spending over 5 years talking over the same frustrations, and attempting solutions to them brings everyone on board extremely cohesively.

An amazing thing was that with Tom Barton (CEO) there, we heard from yet another TWIKI.NET decision maker that they were not aware of the feelings of the community - extremely scary for a startup that alleges to be working in the interests of the community.

Next major hurdle seems to be trademark control - Peter owns the ‘TWiki’ trademark, and TWIKI.NET wants to leverage that to gain an advantage in the TWiki community. It seems to me that the best response is for the community to avoid the issue - by doing what WireShark did when faced by a similar issues with the ‘Ethereal’ trademark - Rename and Re-brand the open source project.

There seems hope that things may not come to that - the second and final day saw the election of an Interm council to guide TWiki to a lasting democratic setup.

Either way, there is definitely cause to be optimistic about the project known as TWiki. Many thanks to Kenneth of Motorola for organising and hosting the Summit.

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Aug 20 2008

ever had Perl CPAN not work on your debian, even though you installed make etc?

Tag: debian, dtrace, enterprise, new, perl, solaris, twiki — Sven Dowideit @ 4:29 pm

CPAN, while incredibly useful, can be a pain, if you forget that you need to re-configure it after installing essential tools.

For example, if you make the mistake of setting up a basic, non-development Debian virtual machine, configure CPAN, try to use it, and on seeing ‘make’ errors like (from install Bundle::CPAN of all things) :
Running make test Can't test without successful make Running make install make had returned bad status, install seems impossible Running install for module Compress::Raw::Zlib Running make for P/PM/PMQS/Compress-Raw-Zlib-2.012.tar.gz Is already unwrapped into directory /root/.cpan/build/Compress-Raw-Zlib-2.012 Has already been processed within this session Running make test Can't test without successful make Running make install make had returned bad status, install seems impossible Running make for P/PM/PMQS/IO-Compress-Zlib-2.012.tar.gz Is already unwrapped into directory /root/.cpan/build/IO-Compress-Zlib-2.012 Has already been processed within this session Running make test Can't test without successful make Running make install make had returned bad status, install seems impossible

cpan>

You install make apt-get update ; apt-get install build-essential…, only to continue to see the same errors wizz past….

CPAN really truly needs to realise that the make settings are mis configured, and tell you.

What you need to do, is to tell your cpan about it by running:
cpan> o conf init

OR, if you’ve not yet messed (configured) up your cpan, install build-essential first.

And while you’re contemplating using cpan, think hard about trying dh-make-perl instead

Ideally, CPAN should be able to realise that it can’t call make if it does not know where it is - and point this fact out, rather than making it appear as though the package being installed has an issue.

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Aug 17 2008

Beware Perl Encode.pm v2.25 when updating TWiki 4.2.2 or WysiwygPlugin

Tag: new, perl, twiki, wiki — Sven Dowideit @ 11:19 pm

I just ran across a pretty annoying issue when updating one of my TWiki’s from 4.2.0 to 4.2.2. The server it is on was running Perl 5.10, but the Encode module was 2.25, resulting in Wysiwyg edits having all their spaces replaced with %20, and line feeds %0A ala

%20Debian%20equivalent%20of%20chkconfig%0A%0A/usr/sbin/update-rc.d%20avahi-daemon%20defaults%0A%0Ahttp%3A//wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Hardware%0A

(look familiar Martin? :))

perl -MCPAN -e shell >upgrade Encode

Got me to Encode v2.26, which fixed it for me.

update: Martin’s just confirmed that it didn’t help him on perl 5.8.4, so perhaps its an odd combination of outdated modules?

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Aug 16 2008

Enterprise Wiki - Debian TWiki repository updated to TWiki 4.2.2

Tag: debian, enterprise, new, twiki — Sven Dowideit @ 4:17 pm

I’ve just updated the Experimental TWiki and Plugins repository. It now contains TWiki 4.2.2 and 226 Plugins, Contribs and Skins that you can simply apt-get install

To use them, add the following 2 lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://distributedinformation.com/experimental/ experimental main contrib deb-src http://distributedinformation.com/experimental/ experimental main contrib

then type
apt-get update
to update the available packages.

you can now see all 226 packages with apt-cache search twiki-

and install (assuming you don’t have twiki installed yet)

apt-get install apache2 twiki

Now that I’ve added external dependancies to the repository, complex TWiki Plugin like ImageGalleryPlugin is as easy as apt-get install twiki-imagegalleryplugin and then enabling it via configure.

etch:~# apt-get install twiki-imagegalleryplugin Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done The following extra packages will be installed: defoma gsfonts libfreetype6 libgraphics-magick-perl libgraphicsmagick1 libice6 libjasper-1.701-1 libjpeg62 liblcms1 libmagick9 libpng12-0 libsm6 libtiff4 libwmf0.2-7 libx11-6 libx11-data libxau6 libxdmcp6 libxext6 libxml2 libxt6 perlmagick x11-common Suggested packages: defoma-doc psfontmgr x-ttcidfont-conf dfontmgr libfreetype6-dev graphicsmagick-dbg libjasper-runtime liblcms-utils libwmf-bin Recommended packages: libft-perl gs-gpl gs xml-core The following NEW packages will be installed: defoma gsfonts libfreetype6 libgraphics-magick-perl libgraphicsmagick1 libice6 libjasper-1.701-1 libjpeg62 liblcms1 libmagick9 libpng12-0 libsm6 libtiff4 libwmf0.2-7 libx11-6 libx11-data libxau6 libxdmcp6 libxext6 libxml2 libxt6 perlmagick twiki-imagegalleryplugin x11-common 0 upgraded, 24 newly installed, 0 to remove and 15 not upgraded. Need to get 11.2MB of archives. After unpacking 25.4MB of additional disk space will be used.

You will still need to use configure to enable Plugins.

Please report your experiences to me - bugs, gripes, you name it - its a work in progress. and I need your help!

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Aug 06 2008

Working towards Native TWiki attachment search

Tag: perl, search, twiki, twikiapplication, wiki — Sven Dowideit @ 7:31 pm

And along the way, TWiki’s inbuilt Topic and structured Search is going to get a boost too.

I’ve been working on trying to bring SearchEngineKinoSearchAddOn into TWiki properly - by adding it as a configuration item in the SearchAlgorithms. So far, its a pretty cool - it super fast, especially on my test topic set of 50,000 plants - even allowing simple structured queries based on TWiki FormFields.

The work will require a few refactorings that will be in TWiki 4.2.2 and above (planned for mid-September), so I expect things to move along quickly.

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