twiki | DistributedInformation

Jan 10 2009

Foswiki delivers results.

Tag: debian,enterprise,foswiki,nextwiki,open source,perl,twiki,twikiapplication,twikifork,wiki — Sven Dowideit @ 9:51 pm

In just 10 weeks, the Foswiki project has re-built the project infrastructure, fixed an additional 100 bugs over and beyond those we fixed in the TWiki source repository before the fork, moved to a new web application architecture (FSA) and undertaken a detailed security audit, fixing at their roots a large number of potential exploits.

Additionally, we already have the following easy installers:

Windows Installer

OSX Leopard installer

Debian and Ubuntu linux

Virtual machine image

So given the over 1800 commits in 10 weeks, a release, and much much more, It seems to me that Foswiki is a success..

Download Foswiki today!

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Jan 03 2009

Foswiki v1 beta 3 Windows Installer

Tag: enterprise,foswiki,new,open source,perl,twiki,twikifork,wiki — Sven Dowideit @ 10:44 am

Yesterday I uploaded the first Foswiki Installer for windows to Foswiki Downloads. It will install Apache 2.2 (if you don’t already have it) and Strawberry Perl and then configure and install Foswiki v1.0.0 beta 3.

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Jan 01 2009

Foswiki v1.0 hits beta

Tag: enterprise,foswiki,nextwiki,open source,perl,twiki,twikiapplication,twikifork,wiki — Sven Dowideit @ 11:13 am

On the 26th of December 2008, Kenneth built Foswiki v1.0 Beta 1, and then Foswiki v1.0 Beta 2 on the 28th. Since then we’ve been busy testing and fixing things that are side effects of the Secure by default policy we’ve instigated.

I’ll be releaseing a Windows installer using Apache 2.2 and Strawberry Perl when Beta 3 is released – we’re still working through some Windows oddities.

its pretty amazing what has been achieved in the 2 months since the project forked.

Massive XSS and parameter validation changes
much more resistant input validation (Perl taint checking)
over 160 bugs fixed

Happy new year, and a happy new Data Wiki release.

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Dec 12 2008

TWiki: a case study of howto lose users?

Tag: enterprise,foswiki,open source,perl,twiki,twikiapplication,twikifork,wiki — Sven Dowideit @ 5:56 pm

In a clear example of TWiki.NET’s new no-testing policy [1], Their star worker has yesterday un-necessarily uploaded over 300 plugins from the wrong branch in Subversion.

Rather than testing each contrib before uploading, as has been the policy on TWiki.org since the Plugins web was created, TWiki.org is now full of buggy, outdated or just plain wrong packages. The only stable option they have is to revert the uploads using rcs – as many plugins are either not up to date in subversion, or worse, are works in progress in Subversion.

Adding that to the latest TWiki 4.2.4 release, which was released with failing unit tests, and some very dubious changes:
we have already submitted to them an updated exploit that is present in 4.2.4 for the CVE-2008-5304 XSS exploit
- presumably they will release 4.2.5 in the next week?

Its a pretty sad time for those of us with users on TWiki (as Foswiki hasn’t released yet), but it has certainly spurred us along, now we need it more than we ever expected.

[1] Tom Barton: issues … impeding progress: an excessively rigorous approach to testing that actually inhibited less experienced developers from contributing code; …

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Dec 09 2008

Strawberry Perl rocks Windows.

Tag: enterprise,foswiki,nextwiki,open source,twiki,twikiapplication,twikifork,wiki — Sven Dowideit @ 4:22 pm

if you’re working or just running Perl on Windows, drop everything, run, don’t walk, to StrawberryPerl. Adam Kennedy has not only made a real Perl for windows, he’s made a _proper_ Perl . One where CPAN just plain works.

Even better, he’s made a Perl that you can use portably, from your USB stick, so you don’t even need to install Perl on your locked down computer.

To learn about his code, I’m building a FoswikiOnAStick distro based on his code, and then I hope to work out how to extend the concept to other platforms.