Re: [Axiom-developer] [fricas-devel] PanAxiom or separate project pages?

[Bill Page]

Ralf,

Axiom wiki does not depend on Plone although it can be used from
Plone.  Axiom wiki was in fact built on another Zope product called
ZWiki.

When you say "static stuff" I wonder if you do not fully appreciate
how a wiki operates.  The "static stuff" is normally not what gets
presented to a user unless they are actually editing the content of a
page. The content is represented in one of several markup formats and
in the case of Axiom-Wiki it also includes embedded LaTeX and Axiom
commands.  When a user clicks Save after editing the content a
"rendered" version of the content is generated and usually also
involves running Axiom (Axiom, FriCAS or OpenAxiom) to convert Axiom
commands and output to embedded LaTeX before converting the embedded
LaTeX to jpeg images.  In a sense the rendered version of the wiki
page is also "static" - so long as it is never edited again.  An awful
lot of the rendered content is in the form of these images.

Anyway it is possible in principle to "harvest" the rendered form
using something like wget.  The result is a css stylesheet for
formating and a bunch of HTML code for each wiki page that includes a
lot of <img> tags plus whole lot (maybe as many as 10,000 or so) of
image files.  I did this once several years ago to produce a CDrom
version of the site.  Everything was OK provided you never clicked on
a function like "edit".  But I think maintaining and updating a static
site like this would be close to impossible.

---

Personally I don't see the point of

> 2) Make the IPython notebook understand %%fricas as a cell magic and provide
> a server that enables people to run some code.

since the Sage notebook interface to FriCAS already exists.  And in
any case it would not be in any sense a replacement for the wiki.

Regards,
Bill Page.

On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 10:24 AM, Ralf Hemmecke <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi Alfredo,
>
>> I am also looking forward to these pages being up again, or just have
>> the text content somewhere.
>
>
> Well, I was trying to put them up, but the computer that I have available
> for this virtual machine does not allow me to run 64bit VMs, because the
> processor is not powerful enough. In other words, I currently have no
> machine.
>
> Anyway, I (of course) also want to see the information back online. However,
> the axiom wiki runs on a very old ubuntu and the Plone installation is also
> very old. I'm not very eager to leave it that way, But upgrading might not
> even work.
>
> In fact, I'm currently thinking about two things.
>
> 1) Put the static stuff to github and manage the pages via sphinx
> http://sphinx.pocoo.org/ .
>
> 2) Make the IPython notebook understand %%fricas as a cell magic and provide
> a server that enables people to run some code.
>
> -----
>
> 1) would probably be a task to go though all the pages and move them into
> restructured text. Not the easiest task, but certainly doable.
> We would be using "git push" to update the website on github. We wouldn't
> have any need to provide a server ourselves and the pages would be
> versioned. Of course, that wouldn't be a wiki, but I don't see much of an
> advantage in a wiki.
>
> 2) Involves understanding the IPython magic. I'm not at all very
> knowledgable in Python, but to me it looks as if it shouldn't be too hard to
> get something like Bill Page did for the sage notebook and Martin Rubey did
> with efricas inside the IPython notebook.
>
> Would you be able to help with (2)?
>
> Anybody else any ideas?
>
> Ralf
>