security of moin 1.9 / migration to other wiki engine?

[robertosussex]

Hi guys,

Some people here at University mentioned the possibility of migrating a MoinMoin Server to a different wiki server claiming that MoinMoini is not safe and "out of support".

1. Is this statement correct?

2. How easy is to migrate Moin Moin to a different kind of wiki?

3. Does any of you have any experience with that?

Cheers

Roberto
University of Sussex

[ThomasWaldmann]

1. it's complicated :-)

[C]Python 2.7 is out of support from [C]Python Development. It might be still supported by some linux distributions (or not).
Also, there are other py27 implementations still in support, e.g. PyPy - might be worth trying.

Whether that is super important depends on many things, like what security issues might come up, whether moin actually is affected (uses the code that has a security issue), who has access to your wiki, etc.

moin 1.9.x itself is still supported (mostly by me) and AFAIK has no currently open security issues.

besides that, one can also do some measures to improve security by isolation, e.g. run the wiki in a VM or on a separate server.
having good backups also helps a lot. :-)

2. migration code

Most wiki migrations in the past hacked together some script that converted most of the markup and did the rest manually. Support and development state of such scripts is usually not too good, because the developers usually only use it once and then lose interest.

OTOH, there is some converter code in moin2 that can transform moin <-> dom <-> {html,mediawiki,...} markups. It might be useful if somebody wants to write a new migration script.

moin2 is not released yet and development is going slow due to only few developer(s) working on it. moin2 works with py3.

3. doing a migration to mediawiki

I never did that myself.

[robertosussex]

I am waiting from the people at Central ITS to decide which option they will give me! In any case we intend to have the wiki sitting INSIDE a VM and/or a Container (Kubernetes or similar) although it will need to be accessible from off campus.
I will keep the ticket open for a little bit ...
Cheers
Roberto

[robertosussex]

Hi,

Has a test been run to use moin 1.9.11 using pypy rather than a standard python?
I could try that ..I suppose
R.

[ThomasWaldmann]

@robertosussex didn't try pypy with moin recently. If you do, please open a separate ticket and give feedback.