Hello again, I just also noticed that the diagrams for the compiler pipeline seem to have disappeared. I refer to those diagrams all the time when I’m working on GHC, so I’d really like it if they could come back somehow. Julian

Julian Leviston writes:

Hi,

When I started this message, I couldn't find the commentary in the wiki any more.

Also, when I try to search with the “search or jump to” box, it sits on “Loading” for quite a while, then I get impatient (after 20 seconds or so), and click off it, but the drop down box doesn’t go away, so I remove the word “Commentary” from the search box, and the drop down box is replaced by a bunch of preset searches. I can’t seem to get it to go away then.

I have also noticed this. The relevant upstream ticket is [1]. The problem appears to be that an empty search result set is returned (strangely) but the user interface is not updated.

Also, down the right hand side of the wiki are a bunch of links which seem to be the first 20 or so, sorted alphabetically, rather than the relevant navigation links in the old trac wiki side nav. I can’t seem to work out how to navigate my way around to find the commentary anymore :(

Yes, GitLab's wiki page list is unfortunately very hard to use in the case of large Wiki [2] like GHC's.

If I type commentary and hit enter, on other hand, it comes up with search results, but it’s quite slow (takes 5 seconds or so to get that page up generally, and feels kind of buggy). That brings up the main commentary page, except I really miss the side-nav that indicated where I was located in the wiki (I realise there’s a breadcrumbs at the top… it says “GHC > Wiki > commentary”, but the commentary page is definitely *not* on the GHC > Wiki page… this makes me feel kind of “lost”.

The Wiki does indeed have a number of problems: 1. The permissions model is too restrictive (https://gitlab.haskell.org/bgamari/gitlab-migration/issues/16) 2. The pages list is slow (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/57751) 3. The pages list doesn't reflect hierarchy (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/57751) 4. Breadcrumbs don't reflect hierarchy (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/30441) I'm aware and am pushing for fixing for all of these: 1. I have a small patch which looses wiki permissions which I will try deploying on Monday. Upstream has also said they are interested in fixing the issue. 2. Upstream is working on improving the situation (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/53523) 3. I have pinged upstream about this and they are planning work in this area (https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/700) 4. This also falls under https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/700.

How is a new person supposed to discover these pages exist? Sorry I don’t want to be whining, but this seems quite important.

Indeed it is important and the status quo is not good. In the short term we have implemented a workaround in the form of a manually generated table of contents page [3]. This is linked to from the Wiki homepage [4] but admittedly this is pretty easy to miss. I suspect I will need to patch the wiki page rendering to make it more visible. I have opened [5] to track this. Currently the index is not automatically regenerated when the Wiki changes but this is on my list of things to fix [6].

Navigating between pages seems quite slow (3 or 4 seconds between page loads).

That is true.

Maybe it’s fine and I’ll get used to it with time. Hope so.

I also hope this improves. The currently situation is quite far from okay, but upstream has been quite responsive to our issues and is working actively to improve it. Cheers, - Ben [1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/51863 [2] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/57751 [3] https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/wikis/index [4] https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/wikis [5] https://gitlab.haskell.org/bgamari/gitlab-migration/issues/48 [6] https://gitlab.haskell.org/bgamari/gitlab-migration/issues/12