[SM-Discuss] Camel Casing Discussion
Juan Carlos Torres
jucato at sourcemage.org
Thu Feb 12 00:08:01 EST 2009
Replying to everything that has been said so far (quite a long one):
1. First of all, Jeremy (emrys) is correct. There is no escaping the fact that
this is how MoinMoin works. It's the deal we got when we switched to using it.
Granted, we can escape links with !WikiName, but the default behavior is still
to make CamelCase words into links. This is the same for "link diarrhea".
Again, there are exceptions and you can explicitly escape links (which is a
bit more work). But this is how wikis work and are meant to work. These
(admittedly inconsistent, specially across wikis) automatic behaviors is what
makes a wiki a wiki. And the CamelCasing is one of the things that make
MoinMoin uniquely MoinMoin.
2. I don't really think there is an issue with how pages are to be named.
Unless the grand circle of mages (or my boss Elisamuel) decides to impose some
style guidelines, I'd say that let common sense be our guide. And he who
writes, decides. If the author decides to use XmlUsage instead of XMLUsage,
then let him have that freedom. If the page is about PRE_BUILD, it doesn't
make sense to name it PreBuild. This goes specially for pages under specific
teams/components, which would be under the direct supervision of their
respective leads and members. IMHO, the duty of the Tome team (but actually
everyone should also be involved) is to make sure that pages are under the
right sections or to fix broken links. Now, broken links are a mess, which is
where automatic linking, camel case or otherwise, is an advantage. Now, if the
author of the page decides to use a non-camel case title, which would not
automatically be linked to, I would dare say that he/she should at least make
sure that links to his page are not broken.
3. Converting/transferring pages now, however, is a bit of a tough one,
because the one doing the conversion (Donald mostly), would have to make that
decision, whether the wiki name is acceptable or not. That said, I don't think
anyone should be afraid to make mistakes because of commit spam. AFAIK, only
the admins or maybe only Jeremy are spammed by commit emails. I get spam from
my RSS feeds though since I'm subscribe. Nonetheless, that is simply not an
issue. (Personally, I prefer keeping acronyms as acronyms and retain their
case, even if it doesn't camel case: FAQ, XML, instead of FaqFoo, or XmlFoo).
So Donald, go wild. :P
4. As for i18n, I have absolutely no idea. In KDE UserBase [1], we use a
Page_Mame_(es) (or PageName_(es)) notation. However, this is actually
automated in a way. We have a template which we can just plug at the top of
any wiki page which automatically lists links to internationalized pages,
whether those pages have content or not. The list of languages is editable
through that template. So all users need to do is add to that template and the
option for that language appears in all pages that include that template. Not
sure how that can be done with MoinMoin.
Having said that, I'm not really sure I like MoinMoin that much, though I
haven't really had much time to work with it fully. In some ways, there are
features that I'm missing in MoinMoin: non-automatic creation of links based
on case (Remko would be happy), templates (great for that i81n I meantioned),
and a Discuss page (per page). If anyone knows if those last 2 features are
possible in MoinMoin, that would be great!
[1] http://userbase.kde.org/
--
Regards,
Juan Carlos G. Torres
Jucato
1024D/6F507597
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/sm-discuss/attachments/20090212/e5f33889/attachment.htm
More information about the SM-Discuss
mailing list