[Haskell-cafe] haskellwiki slow/unresponsive

[Gwern Branwen]

On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 4:17 PM, Eric Rasmussen <ericrasmussen at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is a bit of a tangent, but has anyone developed wiki software in
> Haskell?

Gitit is the most developed one, and it's been suggested in the past
that hawiki move over. It's not a good idea for a couple reasons,
which I've said before but I'll repeat here:

1. Performance; there have been major issues with the Darcs backend,
though mostly resolved, and we don't know how well the Git backend
would scale either. Gitit has mostly been used with single-users (how
I use it) or projects with light traffic (wiki.darcs.net). I don't
know why hawiki is slow, but whatever it is is probably either
hardware or configuration related - MediaWiki after all powers one of
the most popular websites in the world.
2. Security; there have been big holes in Gitit. Some of it is simple
immaturity, some of it due to the DVCS backends. Where there is one
hole, there are probably more - if there aren't holes in the Gitit
code proper, there probably are some in Happstack. There's no reason
to think there aren't: security is extremely hard. And in that
respect, Mediawiki is simply much more battle-tested. (Most popular
websites in the world, again, and one that particularly invites abuse
and attack.)
3. The existing hawiki content is Mediawiki centric, relying on
templates and MW syntax etc. Templates alone would have to be
implemented somehow, and Pandoc's MW parser is, last I heard, pretty
limited.

Gitit is great for what it is, and I like using it - but it's not
something I would rely on for anything vital, and especially not for
something which might be attacked. (This isn't paranoia; I deal with
spammers every day on hawiki, and c.h.o was rooted recently enough
that the memory should still be fresh in our collective minds.)

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net