Why

• too slow: ikiwiki takes 30 seconds to refresh even when changing a single page

• hard to maintain: my patches to ikiwiki are still not merged and it makes upgrades painful

• hard to deploy: it's difficult to tell people to use ikiwiki because it's really hard to install and deploy a new wiki... you need to install the Debian package, then create a git repo (or SVN? or darcs! why not), then create a .setup file, then... I forgot! I had to use ikiwiki-hosting to make my life easier and that just adds another layer of complexity.

• unusual templating engine: Perl's templates may have been great at some point, but they are definitely showing their age now. something more standard like Jinja or Golang templates would be easier for designers to use

• sometimes strange markup rules. just writing this document was a challenge, because preformatted markdown text (prefixed with four spaces) is being interpreted by the wikilinks parser, which lead to errors like:

  $ git grep -h '[[!' | sed 's/[[!/\n[[!/g' | grep '[[!' | sed 's/ .*//' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n
     1 [[!bibtex2html <span class="error">Error: cannot find bestlink for &quot;&lt;span&quot;</span>]]
  ^ false positive, in software/ikiwiki-osm
     1 <a class="toggle" href="#services-wiki-ikiwiki-hugo-conversion.default">more</a>
  ^ IMPORTANT, need to figure it out
    18 [[!img <span class="error">Error: bad image filename</span>]], which have their own unique logic:
  

  I had to use the format directive to workaround those problems.

First conversion attempt

I had to rename all files, and move stuff into content/, then things started generally working "working" (as in "breaking").

I had to clone a theme, the quickstart suggest:

git submodule add https://github.com/budparr/gohugo-theme-ananke.git themes/ananke

Then I had a failure to parse comments:

Error: Error building site: "/home/anarcat/wikis/anarc.at/content/blog/2013-02-04-why-i-dont-pulseaudio.md:2:1": starting HTML comment with no end

Workaround, delete all comments:

505  2019-07-18 17:22:08 grep -l -r -- '<!--' * | grep -e comment  -e '\.md$'  | xargs  sed -i '/<!--/d'

Long term solution might be to convert to shortcodes.

I also tried:

607  2019-07-18 17:11:55 grep -l -r -- '-->$' * | grep -e comment  -e '\.md$'
608  2019-07-18 17:12:15 grep -l -r -- '-->$' * | grep -e comment  -e '\.md$' -0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/-->$/!-->/'
609  2019-07-18 17:12:23 grep -l -r -- '-->$' * | grep -e comment  -e '\.md$'  | xargs  sed -i 's/-->$/!-->/'

Another failure is when it finds an HTML file with an unquoted href argument (e.g. hardware/phone/htc-one-s/apps.html).

Hugo ultra short primer

• apt install hugo - available in Debian, also there's a newer version in unstable
• hugo builds stuff
• hugo serve does that and serves on localhost, with autoreload
• hugo new to post new stuff

Maybe the Emacs mode could be useful.

Results

Result of running hugo build after the renames:

                   | EN   
+------------------+-----+
  Pages            | 734  
  Paginator pages  |  63  
  Non-page files   | 549  
  Static files     |   3  
  Processed images |   0  
  Aliases          |  12  
  Sitemaps         |   1  
  Cleaned          |   0  

Things generally look like crap:

• ikiwiki-specific links are not parsed
• no directives are parsed, so most content is broken
• links are broken
• blog posts are not sorted properly and generally look like crap as well

Inventory

List of directives used in my wiki:

$ git grep -h '\[\[!' | sed 's/\[\[!/\n[[!/g' | grep '\[\[!' | sed 's/ .*//' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n
      1 [[!bibtex2html <span class="error">Error: cannot find bestlink for &quot;&#94;&quot;</span>]]
^ false positive, in software/ikiwiki-osm
      1 <a class="toggle" href="#services-wiki-ikiwiki-hugo-conversion.default">more</a>
^ IMPORTANT, need to figure it out
     18 [[!img
^ IMPORTANT, need to figure it out
     22 [[!color
^ services table, rebuild by hand
     26 [[!iki
^ shortcodes?
     50 [[!format
^ IMPORTANT, need to figure it out
     55 [[!shortcut
^ shortcode, false positive (in shortcuts)
     72 [[!wikipedia
^ shortcode
     96 [[!toc
^ IMPORTANT, need to figure it out (see aboev)
    109 [[!debcve
^ shortcode
    115 [[!debbug
^ shortcode
    142 [[!debpkg
^ shortcode
    268 [[!inline
mostly used in frontpage and blog, need to figure out
    335 [[!tag
^ IMPORTANT, need to figure it out
    358 [[!comment
^ IMPORTANT, need to figure it out
   1254 [[!meta
^ IMPORTANT, need to figure it out

Magic links

There are also a ton of "magic ikiwiki links", called wikilink, which have their own unique logic:

$ git grep -h '\[\[[^!]' | sed 's/\[\[/\n[[/g' | grep '\[\[[^!]' | wc -l 
631

Those will be difficult to convert as the semantics of internal linking in Markdown is not well defined. Or rather, it's bound to HTML (in general) and ikiwiki goes beyond that. Some research needs to be done to see how other engines handle this and how it compares to the linkingrules.

The peculiarities of wikilinks in ikiwiki:

1. case-insensitiven (e.g. [[OtherPage]] and [[otherpage]] both work) - implemented

2. subpage lookups (e.g. [[otherpage]] in foo/subpage will look for foo/subpage/otherpage, foo/otherpage, otherpage, in order; [[foo/subpage]] will find /foo/subpage from bar, instead of the expected bar/foo/subpage in HTML) - implemented

3. absolute lookups (prefixed with /, e.g. [[/about]] links to https://example.com/foo/about if the wiki is in example.com/foo, and not https://example.com/about as HTML normally would - probably relevant only for wikis in subdirectories) - NOT IMPLEMENTED

4. userdir lookups ([[anarcat]] links to [[users/anarcat]] if userdir is set to users) in some contexts (namely comments, recentchanges, but not normal content) - NOT IMPLEMENTED

5. backslash escapes (\[[WikiLink]] is not a link) - implemented by the caller (in LINK_RE)

6. anchor lookups ([[WikiLink#foo]]) - implemented by the caller (in LINK_RE)

7. there might be other rules like underscore (_) mapping to spaces and other funky escape mechanisms - NOT IMPLEMENTED, look at IkiWiki::titlepage for those

Tasks

the gist of it is we need to implement:

• meta (in progress)
• foo/ and foo.mdwn rename to foo/_index.mdwn (see also page bundles and content organization)
• [[link]] and [[link|parser]], hard because we need to figure out pagespec? maybe links and crossferences could save us, or maybe just relative URLs - implemented some of that logic in the parser
• incidentally, backslashed stuff like the above link stuff for example
• table of contents could be a problem: Hugo only has support through templates, not markup (or maybe shortcode would work?) - implemented a directive parser that converts to GitLab's [[__TOC__]] which might be reused)
• img directives (maybe this works
• format (shortcodes? or syntax hilighting)
• shortcodes (dokuwiki converter also suggests using shortcodes for interwiki)
• admonitions (same as shortcode?)
• switch to a branch before making changes?

structural elements needing more thinking:

• RSS
• frontpage and blog structure (inline)
• same with map and orphan pages
• comments
• tags (AKA taxonomies in Hugo parlance)
• 550 non-page files?
• git-annex stuff
• a good theme
• sidebar (maybe see sections)
• blog posts outside of blog/
• search

will be converted by hand:

• services table (color)
• bibtex
• toggle in blog
• pagestats in tags and monthly reports tagr
• openid.mdwn redirect
• meta redirections

Work is ongoing in this conversion script.

Comments

Comments are a particular beast that desserves its own section. Here are the solutions I found online:

Feature comparison:

Discarded alternatives:

Other ideas:

• bridgy "connects websites to social media", including Mastodon
• email gateway - hugo plugin based on jekyll-static-comments which takes comments by email and adds them inside the page, kind of like how ikiwiki comments work (except with email instead of CGI)
• cactus comments "federated comment system for the web, based on the Matrix protocol"
• https://sive.rs/shc - PostgreSQL NOTIFY and LISTEN and a Ruby backend generating a static HTML comments, bespoke
• comments as PRs

Other converters

• Drupal 7
• Simpler conversion
• Previous tests
• Upstream list of converters
• Jamie McClelland migration

Other alternatives

Consider alternative SSGs:

• 11ty: picked by mozilla, javascript
• lektor: used at Tor
• pelican: watch out for pelican, another user reports that, with caching, generating a 500 page site takes 30 seconds, 2 minutes without caching
• zola

See also those comparisons:

• https://www.staticgen.com/
• https://staticsitegenerators.net/

Inspiring themes:

• this hugo theme

Other ideas:

• soupault can do post-processing of the HTML rendered by any SSG, which might provide an interesting base to build what's missing from an alternative