🛠 Repo: Cannot clone wiki repo (error: invalid path)

[mark-wiemer]

Tooling Suggestion Checklist

• I have tried restarting my IDE and the issue persists.
• I have pulled the latest main branch of the repository.
• I have read and agree to Mocha's Code of Conduct and Contributing Guidelines
• I have searched for related issues and issues with the faq label, but none matched my issue.
• I want to provide a PR to resolve this

Overview

While proposing edits to https://github.com/mochajs/mocha/wiki/Third-party-reporters, I wanted to stage my changes for later review. I'm new to GitHub wikis, but I saw there was an option to clone at the bottom right of the page:

When cloning (on Windows, Linux untested), however, git failed to checkout, apparently because the files in the wiki contain colons in their names:

error: invalid path 'HOW-TO:-Correctly-stub-stdout.md'

As a workaround, I'm editing the wikis directly in GitHub, but it'd be nice to be able to propose changes in a more structured way.

Full logs

~/myStuff/repos/mochajs
$ git clone https://github.com/mochajs/mocha.wiki.git
2024-11-08 19:50:02
Cloning into 'mocha.wiki'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 891, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (3/3), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
remote: Total 891 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 888 (from 1)
Receiving objects: 100% (891/891), 104.78 KiB | 1.18 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (541/541), done.
error: invalid path 'HOW-TO:-Correctly-stub-stdout.md'
fatal: unable to checkout working tree
warning: Clone succeeded, but checkout failed.
You can inspect what was checked out with 'git status'
and retry with 'git restore --source=HEAD :/'

[last: 1s]
~/myStuff/repos/mochajs
$ cd mocha.wiki
2024-11-08 19:50:55
[last: 0s]
~/myStuff/repos/mochajs/mocha.wiki (master)
$ git status
2024-11-08 19:50:57
On branch master
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'.

Changes to be committed:
  (use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
        deleted:    Developing-mocha.md
        deleted:    Development-environment-setup.md
        deleted:    HOW-TO:-Correctly-stub-stdout.md
        deleted:    HOW-TO:-Count-assertions.md
        deleted:    HOW-TO:-Find-a-specific-global-leak.md
        deleted:    HOW-TO:-use-environment-variables.md
        deleted:    Home.md
        deleted:    Mess-with-globals.md
        deleted:    Shared-Behaviours.md
        deleted:    Spies.md
        deleted:    Tagging.md
        deleted:    Third-party-UIs.md
        deleted:    Third-party-reporters.md
        deleted:    Using-Mocha-programmatically.md
        deleted:    Using-mocha-with-node-webkit.md
        deleted:    compilers-deprecation.md

[last: 1s]
~/myStuff/repos/mochajs/mocha.wiki (master)
$ git restore --source=HEAD :/
2024-11-08 19:51:12
error: invalid path 'HOW-TO:-Correctly-stub-stdout.md'
error: invalid path 'HOW-TO:-Count-assertions.md'
error: invalid path 'HOW-TO:-Find-a-specific-global-leak.md'
error: invalid path 'HOW-TO:-use-environment-variables.md'
[last: 0s]
~/myStuff/repos/mochajs/mocha.wiki (master)
$

Additional Info

Ref #3104

[mark-wiemer]

Looks like running that recommended git restore ... command did copy most files, just not the ones with the colons in the name. But it's still unclear where the wiki is hosted--looks like an invisible repo linked to this one by GitHub magic! Ref About wikis - GitHub Docs

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

Yeah GitHub Wikis are an oddity. I don't know of any projects that have newly opted to use one in the last ... decade or so. The only ones I personally interact with ever are Mocha and the TypeScript wiki.

In the short term, I think this is unfortunately a wontfix. The wiki is super old and we don't know what resources are linked to the current URLs with :s. We'll need to keep those URLs around.

Long term, I'm not convinced we should keep the wiki as a first-party resource. I do find it super unsettling that it's a classic wiki with no review process for edits. And we already have mochajs.org. Filed #5248.

Thanks for posting!