[Tails-dev] Improving ikiwiki upstream [was: CSS fixes]

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Author: sajolida
Date:  
To: The Tails public development discussion list
Old-Topics: Re: [Tails-dev] CSS fixes
Subject: [Tails-dev] Improving ikiwiki upstream [was: CSS fixes]
intrigeri:
> sajolida:
>> CSS is notoriously painful to work with in the project because nobody
>> likes it, our CSS are super messy, ikiwiki is crap in this regard, etc.
>
> Taking a step back.
>
> I notice that this year again, we're working around ikiwiki
> limitations for the donation campaign. Of course we haven't much
> choice given the timing. But it would be nice to translate these
> limitations into upstream bug reports *at some point*, otherwise we'll
> keep repeating "ikiwiki is crap in this regard" and inventing new
> workarounds as long as we use ikiwiki, which makes me sad, makes
> everyone involved spend time rather pointlessly, and contradicts our
> "Relationship with upstream" statement.
>
> I'd be happy to help translate "ikiwiki is crap in this regard" into
> actionable bug reports, but I can't do it alone.


I admit that I'm very bad at reporting bugs to ikiwiki but in my
imaginary at least, ikiwiki is not a very active upstream project
either. So I thought that the bugs that I might fill would just rot
there forever. But I'm happy to spend some time with you to change my
mindset here if that leads to less pain in the future.

Now:

- Improving our website in general, like reporting and fixing bugs in
ikiwiki is nowhere in our core budget so it would have to be volunteer
time, and at least to me, not at all exciting time. Maybe that's a
problem in our core budget but right now changes happen on the website
mostly through technical writing (which is about content), ideally
through UX (tiny tiny bits), as side effect of other work
(installation assistant, donation campaign, etc.). But right now
nobody is really responsible for this work I think.

- The limitations I suffer the most from in ikiwiki seem, at first
sight, too deep to deserve a bug report. The "templating" system
extremely primitive and my suggestion would be to replacing
completely, it has no CSS framework, it's not designed for content
reuse, etc. But I trust you intrigeri to help me frame this as
more pragmatic fixes that can happen before the year 2525.

What's the next step here and who will do it? Call for a voice meeting
with intrigeri, u, and me? Take a few hours during a sprint to talk
about this? I'm at least not ready to take long hours to write emails
about this and would need synchronous communication.