Per-wiki package namespaces and automated retrieval of wiki pages

[Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org>]

  Hi all,

  I've been brainstorming some ideas relating to how package managers
could provide more useful context to users, and one of them is that it
would be nice to have some way for users to directly share tips and
information on particular packages "out-of-band".

  A wiki is one of the easier ways to do this, and since we already have
one, I was wondering if it would make sense to re-use wiki.debian.net.
This would entail:

  1) Creating a namespace (probably using subpages) for per-package
     pages, or maybe per-source-package pages.  e.g.,
     wiki.debian.org/packages/packagename

  2) Providing a way for package managers to programmatically access
     wiki pages so they can be conveniently displayed alongside other
     package information.  I did only a little research and the
     Web/Wiki experts here might have better ideas, but it looks like
     there's a built-in XMLRPC interface to moinmoin -- it's not clear
     that it works for read/write access, but I think that for editing
     it's probably better to just send the user to the Wiki page
     directly, rather than reimplementing an editing interface in the
     package manager.

  So, since all the tools to do this are available, why am I asking
here?

  Mostly, I want to give you a heads-up before I write code that could
increase the wiki's usage.  I'd hate to get yelled at by the site
admins.  I don't know how much usage this will get, but my impression
was that the wiki gets fairly light usage right now, in which case even
a small increase could be significant.  Is this likely to be an issue?



  I'd also like to check that I'm not going to run into problems with
namespacing on the wiki if I go ahead with this.

  This is all fairly speculative future planning right now, so we have
plenty of time to avoid unpleasant surprises.  No-one likes unpleasant
surprises.  At least I don't. :)

  Daniel