On Fri, 01 Nov 2002 15:47:45 -0800
Brion VIBBER <brion(a)pobox.com> wrote:
It might ultimately be a good idea to have some kind
of explicit 'mirror
mode' such that there's a "see and/or edit the current version of this
page on the main server"-ish link instead of a local edit link.
I agree this is important. It will be sad if we have other general wikis
where users are submitting their edits, which will get lost when the
administrator updates from the main wiki.
I suspect Wiki mirrors will work well if the resources needed to mirror the
database file are made fewer.
Although I don't intend to run a mirror, I have gone through the database
creation steps to learn more about MySQL and to consider creating a PERL
script to make an HTML tree, which shouldn't be too difficult.
Currently, each time someone wishes to update their version of the mirror,
they need to download a 80Mb file, unzip it to 412 Mb then run a database
create (which took me 6 hours with a 10,000 rpm drive). (If I had 1Gb
memory, this would be brought down to 40 min.)
By making the wiki database .MYI, .MYD and .frm files available by
anonymous rsync, mirrors can sync their database to the wiki database in
minutes, with relatively little data transfer (Rsync only sends the
differences between the local and remote copy of the file over the
network). With such a system, I can imagine lots of databased wiki mirrors
pointing their edits back to the main wiki.
The same thing would work just as well, and be easier to implement, using
rsync on an HTML tree image of Wiki.
And perhaps a way to dump a static HTML tree. -- Incidentally, the total
combined size of the pages in article and Wikipedia: space on the
English wiki is about 172 megabytes. The upload directories bring
another 134 megs;
This surprises me. I would think it closer to 400Mb. The current
article
database seems mostly plain text and weighs in at 404Mb without revision
histories. I have viewed the database with Hexedit and less than 10% is
non-text.
we still fit on a CD-ROM uncompressed. That may not
remain so, though...
The KDE Konqueror web browser can navigate and open files in a .tgz
archive, but this would only be a medium-term partial solution.