[cairo] Recent web server trouble and loss of the wiki

[Carl Worth]

Some of you have certainly noticed some problems with the
cairographics.org web site (and other services) this week.

The freedesktop.org machine that hosts this site recently started
misbehaving. We should have lost only web and mailing list service due
to the original, but due to various situations[1] we also had some
interruptions to DNS, git, bugzilla and other services.

After the machine was brought back to life, a new series of
mishaps[**] led to the loss of the cairographics.org wiki
content. Oops.

I've now recovered most of the wiki from google's cache, and
cairographics.org is now serving the original content, but as static
pages, not through any wiki. At least the following content is still
missing:

  * The various sub-pages under "bindings", (I just ran out of steam
    when pulling things out of google and converting them over). Feel
    free to grab a copy from google or elsewhere if you care about
    something here. And let me know if you'd like to put something
    back before we get the wiki turned on again.

  * The recently added answers to the FAQ page, and its
    reorganization. This one is really annoying to me---the google
    cache only has the old version of this page. If anyone happens to
    have a cached version of the page, please send it to me.

If there are other things that you notice missing from the website,
please let me know.

So, for now, things should be pretty much back in place, but we don't
have any wiki software running, (so people can't just edit pages like
they used to be able to).

After seeing the pain that's entailed by an upgrade of moin, I have no
enthusiasm for putting new data back into that beast.

And with the real loss of data here, I'm quite interested in having a
system that distributes lots of copies of our data. So I'm going to be
looking into setting up ikiwiki which will let us maintain the wiki
with git. That is, people that are already using git to maintain
cairo's source code will be able to use it to maintain the website as
well. But people that want to just use a conventional web interface to
edit the wiki should be able to as well.

So stay tuned for more on that, or let me know if you'd like to help
out with any of this. (If anyone with the appropriate talent wants to
contribute a new look to the website, now might be a good time for
that).

-Carl

[1] Daniel's description of the original problem and the unfortunate
exacerbation is here:

http://www.fooishbar.org/blog/tech/fdo/gabe-2007-05-08-17-27.html

[2] The sequence was like this:

  * The machine went through an apt-get-based upgrade after someone
    mistakenly put in a more recent package repository source than
    intended.

  * The upgrade pulled in a new version of moin (the wiki software)
    which broke compatibility with the existing wiki content.

  * We worked fast to migrate wiki content for the many separate wikis
    hosted by freedesktop.org. With moin it turns out that this is a
    very manual, laborious, error-prone, multi-step process.

  * As happens with humans and such processes, there was a mistake
    that deleted some content, (after a conversion of cairo's wiki
    content failed, when trying to start again, we accidentally
    deleted the original content instead of the failed, partially
    converted content).

  * No worries, we have backups, right? ... Well, as it turns out, the
    wikis _were_ all being backed up in general, but some time ago the
    wikis were migrated from one machine to another, and somehow we
    forgot to move cairo's wiki. So cairo's wiki has been running
    without any backup on freedesktop.org, (which, naturally, none of
    us realized until now).
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