ZWiki

Originally the FMI/OS wiki ran on ZWiki. ZWiki is a Zope application that was one of the first to support features such as an integrated issue tracker and the ability to send/receive email to/from the wiki. These where compelling features and the ZWiki did quite well for quite a while. Unfortunately it supported a number of less desirable features as well, such as the inability to run well directly from Apache, instead it required the overhead of Zope along with it. Lack of fine-grained permission handling, lack of integration with popular web servers, and a total divergence from common wikiwiki markup ultimately led to the desire to migrate away from ZWiki.

Trac

With the discovery of Trac, quite a few of the old shortcomings of ZWiki where addressed, such as permissions and good integration with popular web servers. Further more Trac is quite a bit more pleasant out of the box in regards to look and feel. Lastly, Trac is working towards an integrated source code browser that works for all SCM types. At current it works best with an SVN repository, but in due time it should be able to handle Arch/TLA archives as well as Bzr repositories. This is an excellent compliment to the FMI/OS dev process and results in a rather tight coupling between the dev process and the wiki itself. So much so that the Trac time-line includes a view of both the wiki and the source code as a single history.

Where did everything go?

Sadly, the ZWiki markup format is painfully non-portable between wikis. Outside of writing a ZWiki markup translator, all the old ZWiki pages have to be dragged into Trac one at a time by hand, with all the markup redone by hand. For now, all the old pages are stored here as tarballs. Issues are stored separately from the core pages as it is hoped that it will be possible to reintroduce all the old issues into Trac with all their history intact.