Emil Sit: Thoughts on Systems

On our webserver, we run a wiki for tracking various administrative bits. Today, we migrated it from MoinMoin 1.3 to DokuWiki. This was not entirely trivial but at the same time not that difficult. The following method doesn’t preserve history, users or attachments, but seems to basically work. The handling of categories could probably use a little work though.

1. First, find the latest revision of the files and move them to the right place. In sh, this is expressed roughly as:

   MOINWIKI=XXX
   DOKUWIKI=YYY
   
   cd $MOINWIKI/main/data/pages
   for i in *; do
       r=$(ls -tr $i/revisions 2>/dev/null | tail -1);
       if [ "$r" ]; then
           cp $i/revisions/$r $DOKUWIKI/data/pages/$i.txt;
       fi
   done
   

2. Next, you’ll need to handle any categories manually and move them into subdirectories for namespaces. This could probably be automated by splitting based on the (2f)s in the filenames.

3. Since DokuWiki prefers lowercase filenames, go ahead and lowercase all the filenames, e.g.:

   rename '$_ = lc($_)' *.txt
   

   using this handy perl script. You can repeat this for each namespace/category.

4. Hack the markup. Create the following migrate.pl script:

   #!/usr/bin/perl -ni.bak
   
   BEGIN { $readblank = 0; }
   
   $readblank = 1 if /^$/;
   
   # Fix line-endings for Unix
   $//;
   
   # Ignore all pragmas
   next if !$readblank and /^#/;
   
   # Fix different a href linking styles
   s/\[(http:\S+)\s+(.*?)]/[\[$1|$2\]]/g;
   
   # Fix lists that aren't indented enough
   s/^ \*/  \*/;
   
   # Fix ordered lists
   s/^(\s+)\d+\./$1-/;
   
   # Fix code blocks
   s/^{{{$/<code>/;
   s/^}}}$/<\/code>/;
   
   # Fix monospace/code text
   s/`/''/g;
   s/{{{(.*?)}}}/''$1''/g;
   
   # Fix headers
   s/^= (.*) =$/====== $1 ======/g;
   s/^== (.*) ==$/===== $1 =====/g;
   s/^=== (.*) ===$/==== $1 ====/g;
   
   print;
   

   and run it on each file (find . -name "*.txt" | xargs -n 1 perl migrate.pl).

5. Make sure your local.php sets $conf['camelcase'] = 1.

6. You’ll need to move your attachments from the various attachments subdirectories and move them into DokuWiki’s media subdirectory and fix up the links.

That’s it!