[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
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