How to deal with static web pages (Was: Please review med task's home page rewording)

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Steffen,

Andreas had kindly accepted my membership request for the Blends team
and I immediately messed up. Instead of a creating a pull request I had
pushed to master directly. Could you please have a look at
https://salsa.debian.org/blends-team/website/blob/master/www-src/med/index.html
?
What I wanted changed was "information" written twice and I missed the
direction to salsa to request for additional eye balls.

thanks for commit[1] and the ping on the robots issue.

What exaxtly makes you assume that things are messed up by your commit?

Well it did not became effective but that's not yet messing things up.

I try to remember how to update static pages...

Two years ago Iain R. Learmonth invented a system to automatically
generate static pages for all Blends by using jekyll[2]. I tried this
and learned that this will mess up several pages from Debian Astro. So
I reverted the change done by jekyll with the exception of the change in
www/med/index.html which was probably your intention. I guess now we
just need to wait for the according cron jobs until your change becomes
effective. I realised you did another change[4]. While this is now in
the "productive" file there is a slight chance that if we decide for the
jekyll method this will overriden at some point in time.

The general question is: Do we want to stick to the jekyll method? If
yes - and I think that's some interesting option - Debian Astro should
make sure that their pages will be created using this option. If no
(which is fine for me as well) we should rather remove the according
doc to prevent that somebody will fire up jekyll and mess up things.

Kind regards

Andreas.

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/blends-team/website/commit/5fbccd6563fc90eca216cd0dc70d0c1ef11dd86e
[2] https://salsa.debian.org/blends-team/website/blob/master/README-www.txt
[3] https://salsa.debian.org/blends-team/website/commit/b3c362108374be698017b9d4a6de3baad826e759
[4] https://salsa.debian.org/blends-team/website/commit/47b5352a3c621aa9a9abb399e4d5578bbbe819a3

[Ole Streicher]

Post by Andreas Tille
The general question is: Do we want to stick to the jekyll method? If
yes - and I think that's some interesting option - Debian Astro should
make sure that their pages will be created using this option. If no
(which is fine for me as well) we should rather remove the according
doc to prevent that somebody will fire up jekyll and mess up things.

I have no experience with Jekyll: Can it programmatically generate pages
from templates (with Python)? If yes, we could even think of moving the
blends-tasks pages there. The current system uses genshi, which is at
least unusual. And since I think to rewrite the non-static pages anyway,
this would be a good chance to switch.

It not, I could probably replace the generated part of the Debian-Astro
web pages by something static (they did anyway not change as much as I
expected -- to be specific: they didn't change at all). I would however
still like the idea of having a landing page that has some actual
information on it (number of packages, number of bugs, latest uploads or
similar).

Cheers

Ole

[Andreas Tille]

Post by Ole Streicher

Post by Andreas Tille
The general question is: Do we want to stick to the jekyll method? If
yes - and I think that's some interesting option - Debian Astro should
make sure that their pages will be created using this option. If no
(which is fine for me as well) we should rather remove the according
doc to prevent that somebody will fire up jekyll and mess up things.

Me neither. :-(

Post by Ole Streicher
Can it programmatically generate pages
from templates (with Python)? If yes, we could even think of moving the
blends-tasks pages there. The current system uses genshi, which is at
least unusual.

I do not insist on genshi. It was available when I started the tasks
pages and was recommended by some other DD. This was probably 10 years
ago.

Post by Ole Streicher
And since I think to rewrite the non-static pages anyway,
this would be a good chance to switch.

Fine for me to switch to whatever you consider "modern" or "usual".

Post by Ole Streicher
It not, I could probably replace the generated part of the Debian-Astro
web pages by something static (they did anyway not change as much as I
expected -- to be specific: they didn't change at all). I would however
still like the idea of having a landing page that has some actual
information on it (number of packages, number of bugs, latest uploads or
similar).

The pages are in dead that static that the attempt to make some
automatic common generation seems a bit over engineering. Possibly its
totally sufficient to have some server side includes for common chunks
to be able to do common changes easily. I admit I do not mind much but
its important that we do not mess up the static pages of Debian Astro.

Kind regards

Andreas.