Some Quick Notes About the TWiki to ikiwiki Conversion

Incomplete.

I saw a moin2iki program bundle being announced from http://ikiwiki.info/index/discussion/#index2h1.

<tschwinge> JoshTriplett: On http://ikiwiki.info/users/joshtriplett.html
  you write about a TWiki to ikiwiki conversion script.  Is that already
  available somewhere?
<JoshTriplett> tschwinge: Yes, you can get it in its current state at
  git://svcs.cs.pdx.edu/git/moin2iki.git
<JoshTriplett> tschwinge: That repo has scripts for converting from Moin
  and TWiki to ikiwiki.
<JoshTriplett> tschwinge: Work in progress.
<JoshTriplett> tschwinge: For a purely TWiki setup, it should work fine.
<JoshTriplett> tschwinge: You need a number of depenencies, though, and we
  haven't documented them well yet.
<tschwinge> JoshTriplett: Thanks, I'll have a look and report back (in some
  days, I hope).
<JoshTriplett> tschwinge: In particular, you need HTML::WikiConverter with
  our 12 ikiwiki-related patches.
<JoshTriplett> tschwinge:
  http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=24446

As I had difficulties with extracting the patches from the cpan site, they were also made available by the authors at http://svcs.cs.pdx.edu/~jamey/wikiconverter/.

The Debian package libhtml-wikiconverter-perl is too old at least until Debian bug #419918 is closed.

For converting from rcs files (as used by TWiki) to a git repository you'll need to get git clone git://people.freedesktop.org/~keithp/parsecvs and build it. Or don't do that and install the Debian git-cvs package instead; see below.

Here is the command line I used (line breaks added for readability) to create an Authors file from the TWiki files, suitable for parsecvs or git-cvsimport to use:

$ sort < data/Main/TWikiUsers.txt | uniq | ↩
    while read s n r; do ↩
      ( [ "$s" != \* ] || expr "$r" : .\*\< > /dev/null) && continue; ↩
      echo "$n"="$(recode Latin1..UTF-8 < data/Main/"$n".txt | ↩
        awk -v name="$n" 'BEGIN { FS = ": "; email = "[email protected]" } ↩
          { sub("\r$", "") } $1 ~ /\* Name$/ { name = $2 } ↩
          $1 ~ /\* Email$/ { email = $2 } ↩
          END { print name " <" email ">" }')"; ↩
    done | tee Authors

The old TWiki installation had managed to corrupt one of its own rcs files, which both parsecvs and git-cvsimport stumbled on. As that file was not essential for me, I simply deleted it.

The final output (after the TWiki markup to Markdown markup conversion) was expected to pour out .mdwn files. However the original TWiki files are named .txt. As the git-map step as yet (would this be possible at all?) has no way to rename the files while converting, I simply adapted the input files' names to what was expected: I ran a the following command to rename the .txt,v files to .mdwn,v files before running git-cvsimport:

$ find ./ | grep \\.txt,v | while read f; do ↩
    mv -vi "$f" "$(expr "$f" : \\\(.\*\\\)\\.txt,v)".mdwn,v; done

Instead of using parsecvs (which finally even choked on the valid rcs input files) I eventually ended up successfully converting the old TWiki with git-cvsimport:

$ git-cvsimport -v -d "`pwd`"/../hurd-wiki/ -z 0 -a -A ../Authors data
[...]
Committed patch 4698 (origin +0000 2007-04-13 17:40:08)
Commit ID c33d05d0274d0d602fba835805abb9ba413c65c6
Generating pack...
Done counting 18576 objects.
Deltifying 18576 objects...
 100% (18576/18576) done
Writing 18576 objects...
 100% (18576/18576) done
Total 18576 (delta 12567), reused 16106 (delta 10886)
Pack pack-d38e3d55705f5d355f669aaa7d993420b50798d0 created.
Removing unused objects 100%...
Done.
DONE; creating master branch

The only thing I had to do to make the conglomerate of rcs files a valid cvs repository (read: to satisfy git-cvsimport's needs) was a mkdir ../hurd-wiki/CVSROOT.

Then let's convert the whole git tree from TWiki syntax to Markdown:

$ TWIKI="`pwd`"/../hurd-wiki tw_2001-12-01_2iki "`pwd`"/.git
[...]

After that I repeated -- in a separate directory!, they can be merged later -- the same last steps again, replacing data with pub, which contains the data files that had been attached to the wiki pages (like images, for example).