Wiki search & pages

[Ben Gamari]

Julian Leviston <julian at leviston.net> writes:

> Hi,
>
> When I started this message, I couldn't find the commentary in the
> wiki any more.
>
> Also, when I try to search with the “search or jump to” box, it sits
> on “Loading” for quite a while, then I get impatient (after 20 seconds
> or so), and click off it, but the drop down box doesn’t go away, so I
> remove the word “Commentary” from the search box, and the drop down
> box is replaced by a bunch of preset searches. I can’t seem to get it
> to go away then.
>
I have also noticed this. The relevant upstream ticket is [1]. The
problem appears to be that an empty search result set is returned
(strangely) but the user interface is not updated.


> Also, down the right hand side of the wiki are a bunch of links which
> seem to be the first 20 or so, sorted alphabetically, rather than the
> relevant navigation links in the old trac wiki side nav. I can’t seem
> to work out how to navigate my way around to find the commentary
> anymore :(
>
Yes, GitLab's wiki page list is unfortunately very hard to use in the
case of large Wiki [2] like GHC's.

> If I type commentary and hit enter, on other hand, it comes up with
> search results, but it’s quite slow (takes 5 seconds or so to get that
> page up generally, and feels kind of buggy). That brings up the main
> commentary page, except I really miss the side-nav that indicated
> where I was located in the wiki (I realise there’s a breadcrumbs at
> the top… it says “GHC > Wiki > commentary”, but the commentary page is
> definitely *not* on the GHC > Wiki page… this makes me feel kind of
> “lost”.
>
The Wiki does indeed have a number of problems:

 1. The permissions model is too restrictive
    (https://gitlab.haskell.org/bgamari/gitlab-migration/issues/16)

 2. The pages list is slow
    (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/57751)

 3. The pages list doesn't reflect hierarchy
    (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/57751)

 4. Breadcrumbs don't reflect hierarchy
    (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/30441)

I'm aware and am pushing for fixing for all of these:

 1. I have a small patch which looses wiki permissions which I will try
    deploying on Monday. Upstream has also said they are interested in
    fixing the issue.

 2. Upstream is working on improving the situation
    (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/53523)

 3. I have pinged upstream about this and they are planning work in this
    area (https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/700)

 4. This also falls under https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/700.

> How is a new person supposed to discover these pages exist? Sorry I
> don’t want to be whining, but this seems quite important.
>
Indeed it is important and the status quo is not good. In the short term
we have implemented a workaround in the form of a manually generated
table of contents page [3]. This is linked to from the Wiki homepage [4]
but admittedly this is pretty easy to miss. I suspect I will need to
patch the wiki page rendering to make it more visible. I have opened [5]
to track this.

Currently the index is not automatically regenerated when the Wiki
changes but this is on my list of things to fix [6].


> Navigating between pages seems quite slow (3 or 4 seconds between page
> loads).
>
That is true.

> Maybe it’s fine and I’ll get used to it with time. Hope so.
>
I also hope this improves. The currently situation is quite far from
okay, but upstream has been quite responsive to our issues and is
working actively to improve it.

Cheers,

- Ben


[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/51863
[2] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/57751
[3] https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/wikis/index
[4] https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/wikis
[5] https://gitlab.haskell.org/bgamari/gitlab-migration/issues/48
[6] https://gitlab.haskell.org/bgamari/gitlab-migration/issues/12
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