[Axiom-developer] Axiom Wiki and Portal are moving

[Bill Page]

Dear Axiom Users and Developers;

Earlier in October Tim Daly asked me if I would be able to move the Axiom wiki:

    http://wiki.axiom-developer.org

and the Axiom portal:

    http://portal.axiom-developer.org

web applications to a new server. The server where they have resided
for the last three years is a shared virtual server located at a
privately operated ISP. During the entire time Tim has paid for the
operation of this server from his own personal financial resources.
Meanwhile Tim's priorities for the original Axiom project have been
clarified and two new forks of Axiom (FriCAS and OpenAxiom) have been
created as a result. As implementer of the wiki and portal
applications on the axiom-developer server (based on the 'mathaction'
and 'LatexWiki' extension of ZWiki), I have argued that these
applications should actually support all of the existing Axiom-related
projects (Axiom, FriCAS, OpenAxiom and Aldor on Axiom) developers and
users as well as continue to provide interfaces for Reduce, Maxima,
and Sage. But Tim has decided that he would rather devote the
resources of the axiom-developer.org server to more Axiom-project
specific activities and also (if possible) reduce the cost of
operation of this server. This is certainly his prerogative and it is
my intention to help him meet that goal with as little disruption to
people who current use these applications as possible.

As most of you probably already know, William Stein offered to host a
version of the Axiom wiki and Axiom portal applications on the large
multi-processor computer system that supports the Sage project. So I
have spent some time over the last couple of months re-implementing
mathaction and related software there. The software is not identical
to the software on axiom-developer.org but rather a long-needed
software upgrade based on the most recent release of ZWiki. As a
result, the specific look and feel of the new web sites is not
identical to the old ones. There are some missing features some of
which can be restored by special customizations of ZWiki (e.g. the
lefthand sidebar, the comment preview function and the Axiom menus at
the bottom of the edit page). Some of these I have not yet had time to
do and others I am considering alternative ways of doing something
similar but with less special customization. Also, due to lack of
time, I have moved only a subset of the web pages from the old sites
to the new one. This is true of both the wiki and portal sites.

In spite of this and in view of Tim's desire to complete the move as
soon as possible, I would like to invite everyone to begin using the
new sites now. They can be found at:

    http://axiom-wiki.newsynthesis.org

and

    http://axiom-portal.newsynthesis.org

Don't be fooled by the domain name "newsynthesis.org". This is a
domain name that I own but the names 'axiom-wiki' and 'axiom-portal'
are actually mapped to the 'sage.math.washington.edu' server supplied
by William Stein. I intend to continue to make these names available
for Axiom-related use over at least the next 10 years. I chose this
approach in order to provide as conveniently short urls as possible
and also to permit the urls to remain the same and be remapped in case
of any possible future move of these applications.

For the time being, the applications at 'axiom-developer.org' will
continue to operate but at some point (final details still to be
determined) the old url names may be re-mapped to point at the same
site as the new ones (for search engine compatibility) before they are
eventually phased out altogether and the applications and associated
database removed from axiom-developer.org.

So I would like to encourage everyone who cares about Axiom (and/or
it's forks) and who is interested in wiki and portal support for these
projects to help with testing and re-populating the new sites as soon
as possible. After three years of operation of the Axiom wiki there
are a fairly large number of out-dated, poorly organized and possibly
irrelevant pages which probably should not be simply copied over to
the new site. I would be very very happy if some other Axiom users and
developers would agree to assist with this "shifting" and
re-organizing effort. Copying missing content between the sites can be
easily done by cutting-and-pasting the text from the 'edit' of the old
site to the corresponding 'edit' page of the new site. I would be
happy to discuss details, make suggestions and general try to help
anyone who wants to try this. These web sites are intended to be
community supported web sites and everyone is welcome and encouraged
to participate in making them as useful as possible to all Axiom users
and developers.

The most serious missing component at the new Axiom wiki site is the
existing database of IssueTracker reports. I have tried unsuccessfully
to copy to the old database to the new server. In any case it is also
true that a number of these reports may be obsolete or may not apply
equally to all of the Axiom projects. Also some of the Axiom projects
(forks) have their own way of tracking problems, e.g. OpenAxiom simply
uses SourceForge. So I am open to suggestions on how to proceed with
this transferring this information (and/or comments about whether this
is really necessary or not).

At this time Aldor is the only computer algebra program that has not
yet been installed on the new server. (Axiom, Maxima, Reduce, and Sage
are also working.) My current priority is to complete the build of
Aldor for Axiom so that it will be possible to run the Aldor example
code on the wiki pages again. My intention is to use the newest
version of FriCAS and the new open source release of Aldor. Some
things have changed since I did this last, so it may take a little
more time but this should be completed in the new few days.

And as usual, if you have any questions, comments, suggestions or
criticisms I would be glad to hear them.

Regards,
Bill Page.