[Haskell-cafe] Final steps in GHC's Trac-to-GitLab migration

Ben Gamari ben at well-typed.com
Wed Mar 6 11:09:35 UTC 2019


The lacking redirect support is unfortunate. In my opinion this is something we will need to handle going forward as well; a one time solution like adding nginx redirects doesn't seem like the right approach to me. 

I would rather advocate either option 3 or one of the following options:

 5. Detect redirects and convert them to symbolic links in the repo
 6. Request redirect support in the gitlab wiki.

On March 6, 2019 5:55:15 AM EST, Tobias Dammers <tdammers at gmail.com> wrote:
>On Wed, Mar 06, 2019 at 09:32:44AM +0300, Ömer Sinan Ağacan wrote:
>> - Redirects don't seem to work:
>>  
>https://gitlab.staging.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/wikis/commentary/rts/heap-objects
>
>I believe this is an unfortunate result of the way we migrate wiki
>pages. The way that works is that we don't actually parse the original
>Trac markup; instead, we scrape the rendered HTML directly from the
>live
>Trac instance, and massage that into GitLab markup.
>
>This has a few interesting consequences:
>
>1. "Wiki processors", such as for example dynamically-generated TOCs
>and
>issue lists, get to run on the Trac instance as we request the page,
>and
>thus capture a snapshot of the dynamic data at the time of migration.
>2. Redirects, being implemented as such wiki processors, cause
>client-side redirects, which our scraper will not follow. Hence, the
>converted page is based on an HTML page body that you don't normally
>get
>to see, and no actual redirect is generated on the GitLab side of
>things.
>3. The scraper only looks at what is normally the actual page content;
>any additional UI generated outside of the main content element is
>ignored. Hence, when Trac generates links to the redirect target for
>clients that do not support client-side redirects, those links don't
>make it into the converted page.
>4. Because redirects are usually the last thing to be added to a page,
>that page's history ends there, and becomes the "current" version on
>the
>GitLab side. So we end up with what you're seeing: a nonsensical page
>that contains the fallback content, a somewhat cryptic question asking
>whether it should redirect, and no way to answer that question.
>
>Since GitLab doesn't have an equivalent to those "wiki processors", and
>AFAIK does not cater for such redirects, the question is how we should
>handle these. I can think of several options:
>
>1. Do nothing; when anyone complains, fix the offending pages manually
>(either by converting the useless redirect message into a proper
>hyperlink, or by manually adding a rewrite entry to the nginx
>configuration).
>2. Generate a list of redirecting pages from the Trac dataset, either
>as
>part of the import (2a), or with some grep/sed/awk magic based on the
>converted git repo after the fact (2b); then use that list to generate
>suitable nginx redirects.
>3. Extend the import script to detect redirects, and special-case those
>so that they render as proper links to the redirect target.
>4. Do more research and see if there is a way to make GitLab redirect
>based on wiki content, then extend the import script like in step 3,
>but
>render redirecting pages to use the (currently hypothetical) redirect
>feature.
>
>Personally, I'm inclined to say let's go with option 2b: run the
>import,
>then grep for 'redirect(wiki:', and massage that into nginx redirects.
>
>TL;DR: the import currently ignores Trac wiki redirects, and I'm not
>sure what the best way is to deal with this.
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-- 
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