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nLab > nLab Technical Matters: server error in some diff and previous-revision views

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    • CommentRowNumber1.
    • CommentAuthorgregprice
    • CommentTimeJul 16th 2022
    When I look at https://ncatlab.org/nlab/history/Heyting+algebra and then follow the "diff" link for any of the latest handful of revisions, I get a "500 Server Error" page.

    Specifically, I get the error with revision 51:
    https://ncatlab.org/nlab/revision/diff/Heyting+algebra/51
    or revision 52. (The very latest "diff" link, for 53, seems to actually take me to the edit page instead.) I get no error at revision 50:
    https://ncatlab.org/nlab/revision/diff/Heyting+algebra/50
    or any earlier revision I've tried.

    I get a similar error at the "revision" page for 51 or later:
    https://ncatlab.org/nlab/revision/Heyting+algebra/51
    while things similarly work fine for 50 or earlier.

    All of the last handful of revisions (49 onward) were made by me in the last 24 hours or so.

    The actual page renders just fine as far as I can tell. I added a significant amount of material, but I didn't think I'd done anything particularly fancy.
    • CommentRowNumber2.
    • CommentAuthorgregprice
    • CommentTimeJul 16th 2022
    Looking closer at the "revision" page, I see it does render differently from the page itself: in particular, theorem/proof environments, labels, and refs come through as literal TeX, rather than getting interpreted. So perhaps there's some syntax I used that the history renderer not only can't interpret (like those) but chokes on, even though the normal page rendering handles it fine.

    Perhaps the indentation in the numbered list? (That took some experimenting to get into a form that the normal page renderer handled in the intended way, rather than interpret the indentation as a code block.) Or the `\[` equation syntax? I hesitate to experiment, being not entirely sure what all the consequences of the error might be.
    • CommentRowNumber3.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeJul 16th 2022
    • (edited Jul 16th 2022)

    Yes, unfortunately the diff-fumctionality was severely broken some time ago: A different rendering engine is used for current pages than for pages in the page history.

    I believe the technical team is aware of this, but that the attitude is not to fix this problem individually for the time being.

    So you should use the page history as far as it may still be useful, and please just ignore it otherwise.

    I hope that eventually we collect more donations and then have someone professional fix this and a host of other issues. But before we can look into that we have to migrate the server, which is still ongoing.

    • CommentRowNumber4.
    • CommentAuthorgregprice
    • CommentTimeJul 16th 2022
    OK, that works for me! Thanks for the reply (and all your hard work in general.)

    I'd noticed that the diff pages often didn't really work correctly when nontrivial syntax was involved -- they'll show yellow error boxes in the middle of the diff at the affected spots -- but this was the first time I'd seen the whole page come back as just an error, so I figured I'd do as the error page requests and make a report here.
    • CommentRowNumber5.
    • CommentAuthorgregprice
    • CommentTimeJul 16th 2022

    Reporting this caused me to see this discussion-category of the nForum for the first time, and I just went and read through the nLab migration to the cloud thread. That must have been a painful few months; my sympathies. I’m happy you eventually got it back running again like it was, and that it seems like the server is now in the hands of a team with a more collaborative approach and a more sensible, incremental plan.

    For what it’s worth, my guess would be that you have a better chance of getting software issues of this sort fixed with in-kind donations of effort and expertise – the same way as the content of the nLab – than by getting donations enough to pay for the work. The key step for unlocking that possibility would be to develop a clear set of instructions for how an interested person can set up and run the nLab software on their own machine, in order to experiment with changes.

    • CommentRowNumber6.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeJul 16th 2022

    That’s what I used to think, too. But the technical board members tell me that the software the nLab is running on is – and further has been over time – so profoundly broken that no volunteer stands a chance of fixing it on the side. I can’t judge this, but we have been discussing this at some length, and that’s what they say. They tell me, if I recall correctly, that we need a professional software engineer devoting their full time to the job for something in between 2-6 months.

    So that’s my plan for the future: First we wait for the migration to be done (which is underway, certainly the process has been started) then announce the migration to the public, as a first item that the existing donations allowed us to buy, then use the occasion of this little success to ask for further donations, and finally use these to hire a professional programmer to rewrite the nLab software.

    Regarding installing the nLab on a private machine: Apparently that’s unfeasible, but I know the least about this. If you have IT expertise and are eager to help, I’d bring you in contact with the technical board members.

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