Re: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki 1.17 release target (Re: UsabilityInitiative extension...)

2010-09-20 Thread MZMcBride
Rob Lanphier wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 4:01 PM, MZMcBride  wrote:
>> Quite a few people are under the impression that MediaWiki 1.17 will be
>> released in October or November of this year.
> 
> I don't think there's been many public references to this, but that is
> more or less the timeframe many of us have discussed. There is at
> least one public reference here:
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Meetings/Release/2010-07-14

Thank you for this. I'm sure a lot of people will be watching the root page
with a lot of interest. I agree with a lot of the other posters in this
thread that publicly posting notes like this is a really good step in the
right direction. :-)

> Several of us have a desire to get back on a more regular release
> cadence with MediaWiki releases generally, and MediaWiki 1.17 seemed
> like a good place to start.

I think there's a much greater desire for the live Wikimedia sites to be
updated more regularly, far more than MediaWiki being released more
regularly. Not that they're mutually exclusive, though with the current
branch system, I suppose they could be, which raises further questions.

> The goal, as I recall, was branching October 15 or thereabouts, with
> first beta in November, and a release sometime after that (perhaps as
> late as January, depending on how well we do with the first beta).  We
> really haven't had an organized discussion of the topic since that one
> meeting above, but maybe this email thread can be that conversation.
> Nothing about the schedule is carved in stone, so now is as good a
> time as any to bring up any objections to that timeline.

Personally, I see a rough parallel between the concept of FlaggedRevs on a
wiki and the current code development cycle. Nobody wants to make a
contribution if it's going to sit in a queue indefinitely. It's much more
satisfying to see your work (bug fix, article fix, whatever) go live in a
relatively short amount of time.

Has there been any discussion about killing the branch system altogether?
>From my perspective, the initiation of branching has slowed down code pushes
dramatically. This may be a false correlation I'm drawing, but I don't think
so. There isn't nearly as much incentive to fix trunk when the branches are
stable. But with that stability comes very little code development, aside
from high priority Wikimedia Foundation projects being pushed into the
branches directly by a few people. It also creates a lot more work (and
commit noise) to merge from trunk rather than keeping trunk up and
relatively stable (or stable enough to run the live sites). Has it been
raised that going back to how things used to be might be better?

MZMcBride



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Re: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki 1.17 release target (Re: UsabilityInitiative extension...)

2010-09-20 Thread Rob Lanphier
On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 4:53 PM, Aryeh Gregor
 wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 7:47 PM, Rob Lanphier  wrote:
>> The goal, as I recall, was branching October 15 or thereabouts, with
>> first beta in November, and a release sometime after that (perhaps as
>> late as January, depending on how well we do with the first beta). [...]
>
> I think the primary objection would be that we don't want to do a
> release of code that hasn't run on Wikimedia for a while.  We never
> have before, certainly.  Not many people use wikis running RCs or
> betas compared to the number who use Wikipedia, so we'll get vastly
> fewer bug reports and thus ship a much buggier release if we don't
> scap the code well before we release it.  It's also kind of sketchy to
> say that trunk is good enough for release when it hasn't been vetted
> as suitable for Wikimedia deployment.

This seems like a fine line of reasoning, though not one that I had
thought was set in stone.  For earlier releases, the MediaWiki
releases benefited from deployment being pretty close to trunk, but
presumably the reason why that drifted was because it became
progressively harder for us to use our production environment as the
de facto MediaWiki testbed.

So, 1.16wmf4 and 1.16 shared the same branch point, which was perhaps
the start of a tradition.  Is this the new rule?  I don't have a
strong opinion about whether that should be the case, but it does
change how I think about 1.17 planning.

My understanding is that we will probably want a new deployment branch
soon because of ResourceLoader (at least).

> So whatever the timetable is, we need to have "scap" placed somewhere
> significantly before "branch for release".  If we say a month before,
> then that would be five days ago according to your timetable, so I
> don't think that's a good idea.

I'm not sure what you mean by this.  October 15 would be the branch
point, not the release date.  Are you saying that we have to release
to production one month before even branching off of trunk?

Rob

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Re: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki 1.17 release target (Re: UsabilityInitiative extension...)

2010-09-20 Thread Casey Brown
On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 8:08 PM, Trevor Parscal  wrote:
> I sometimes wonder if we are better at talking about things than doing
> them. How easy would it be to just add a link the [[Meetings]] and be
> done with it. Yet, here we all are typing away about it... Not sure if
> this is all bad... but it doesn't seem all good.

We're not always sure where or how something should be done, so we
talk about it and look for ideas.  Take this issue for example, we're
not sure where something should be linked, but mention it here knowing
that someone else probably has some ideas -- that person is then free
to be bold and add a link wherever he thinks would be good.

Speaking more generally, the reason that people might be better at
talking about doing things rather than doing them themselves could be
because they're afraid they'll just get reverted if they try to be
bold.

-- 
Casey Brown
Cbrown1023

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Re: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki 1.17 release target (Re: UsabilityInitiative extension...)

2010-09-20 Thread Guillaume Paumier
Le lundi 20 septembre 2010 à 17:08 -0700, Trevor Parscal a écrit :
> I think someone (RobLa) is planning on populating these areas of the 
> wiki as more meetings take place - so I'm not sure we should be so 
> critical of the number of links in [[Meetings/Release]] - but yeah, 
> you've got a fair point, if we are going to be keeping meeting notes in 
> a public place (a big thank you should go to RobLa here!) some links to 
> the meetings page would help make the public notes a little more public.
> 
> I would add some myself, but I'm not sure I know where the link to 
> [[Meetings]] should go.
> 
> I sometimes wonder if we are better at talking about things than doing 
> them. How easy would it be to just add a link the [[Meetings]] and be 
> done with it. Yet, here we all are typing away about it... Not sure if 
> this is all bad... but it doesn't seem all good.

Oh, I'm not specifically criticizing the number of links. I actually
think it's great the notes are being posted publicly.

I'm just generally commenting on the fact that it's difficult to find
the information if you don't know it's even there. Adding a link to
[[Meetings]] is easy, but probably not much more helpful in attracting
eyeballs. 

I guess my main general point was "Keeping people informed is as easy as
sending an email to wikitech-l".  

-- 
Guillaume Paumier


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Re: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki 1.17 release target (Re: UsabilityInitiative extension...)

2010-09-20 Thread Trevor Parscal
  I think someone (RobLa) is planning on populating these areas of the 
wiki as more meetings take place - so I'm not sure we should be so 
critical of the number of links in [[Meetings/Release]] - but yeah, 
you've got a fair point, if we are going to be keeping meeting notes in 
a public place (a big thank you should go to RobLa here!) some links to 
the meetings page would help make the public notes a little more public.

I would add some myself, but I'm not sure I know where the link to 
[[Meetings]] should go.

I sometimes wonder if we are better at talking about things than doing 
them. How easy would it be to just add a link the [[Meetings]] and be 
done with it. Yet, here we all are typing away about it... Not sure if 
this is all bad... but it doesn't seem all good.

- Trevor

On 9/20/10 5:01 PM, Guillaume Paumier wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Le lundi 20 septembre 2010 à 16:47 -0700, Rob Lanphier a écrit :
>> I don't think there's been many public references to this, but that is
>> more or less the timeframe many of us have discussed. There is at
>> least one public reference here:
>> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Meetings/Release/2010-07-14
> The only incoming link for [[Meetings/Release/2010-07-14]] is
> [[Meetings/Release]], whose only incoming link is [[Meetings]], which
> doesn't have any incoming link.
>
> Discussions involving as major a decision as a release date should
> probably be a little more advertised :)
>

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Re: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki 1.17 release target (Re: UsabilityInitiative extension...)

2010-09-20 Thread Guillaume Paumier
Hi,

Le lundi 20 septembre 2010 à 16:47 -0700, Rob Lanphier a écrit :
> 
> I don't think there's been many public references to this, but that is
> more or less the timeframe many of us have discussed. There is at
> least one public reference here:
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Meetings/Release/2010-07-14

The only incoming link for [[Meetings/Release/2010-07-14]] is
[[Meetings/Release]], whose only incoming link is [[Meetings]], which
doesn't have any incoming link. 

Discussions involving as major a decision as a release date should
probably be a little more advertised :)

-- 
Guillaume Paumier


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Re: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki 1.17 release target (Re: UsabilityInitiative extension...)

2010-09-20 Thread Aryeh Gregor
On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 7:47 PM, Rob Lanphier  wrote:
> I don't think there's been many public references to this, but that is
> more or less the timeframe many of us have discussed. There is at
> least one public reference here:
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Meetings/Release/2010-07-14
>
> Several of us have a desire to get back on a more regular release
> cadence with MediaWiki releases generally, and MediaWiki 1.17 seemed
> like a good place to start.
>
> The goal, as I recall, was branching October 15 or thereabouts, with
> first beta in November, and a release sometime after that (perhaps as
> late as January, depending on how well we do with the first beta).  We
> really haven't had an organized discussion of the topic since that one
> meeting above, but maybe this email thread can be that conversation.
> Nothing about the schedule is carved in stone, so now is as good a
> time as any to bring up any objections to that timeline.

I think the primary objection would be that we don't want to do a
release of code that hasn't run on Wikimedia for a while.  We never
have before, certainly.  Not many people use wikis running RCs or
betas compared to the number who use Wikipedia, so we'll get vastly
fewer bug reports and thus ship a much buggier release if we don't
scap the code well before we release it.  It's also kind of sketchy to
say that trunk is good enough for release when it hasn't been vetted
as suitable for Wikimedia deployment.

So whatever the timetable is, we need to have "scap" placed somewhere
significantly before "branch for release".  If we say a month before,
then that would be five days ago according to your timetable, so I
don't think that's a good idea.

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[Wikitech-l] MediaWiki 1.17 release target (Re: UsabilityInitiative extension...)

2010-09-20 Thread Rob Lanphier
On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 4:01 PM, MZMcBride  wrote:
> Quite a few people are under the impression that MediaWiki 1.17 will be
> released in October or November of this year.

I don't think there's been many public references to this, but that is
more or less the timeframe many of us have discussed. There is at
least one public reference here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Meetings/Release/2010-07-14

Several of us have a desire to get back on a more regular release
cadence with MediaWiki releases generally, and MediaWiki 1.17 seemed
like a good place to start.

The goal, as I recall, was branching October 15 or thereabouts, with
first beta in November, and a release sometime after that (perhaps as
late as January, depending on how well we do with the first beta).  We
really haven't had an organized discussion of the topic since that one
meeting above, but maybe this email thread can be that conversation.
Nothing about the schedule is carved in stone, so now is as good a
time as any to bring up any objections to that timeline.

Rob

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Re: [Wikitech-l] UsabilityInitiative extension is going to die

2010-09-20 Thread MZMcBride
Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> Implying that particular groups of developers aim to suppress
> particular technical opinions, without naming the developers or giving
> any supporting evidence, is definitely trolling.

You think calling specific individuals out ("getting personal") would
_improve_ matters? Interesting. Saying "thanks for your input" seems like a
pretty clear example of developers trying to suppress (or dismiss, rather)
particular technical opinions. I included a link to the relevant comments in
the follow-up e-mail.

> This post would have been much improved if the second
> sentence were deleted, and your follow-up post could have done without
> language such as "artificial", "hasty", "appears to have no basis in
> reality" when speaking about a developer's actions.

Quite a few people are under the impression that MediaWiki 1.17 will be
released in October or November of this year. I've seen nothing publicly
that supports this, so until then, I'll treat it as dubious. I think it's
reasonable to do so. I asked in the follow-up e-mail if I was simply missing
an announcement somewhere about an updated roadmap or deadline, which is
entirely possible.

MZMcBride



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Re: [Wikitech-l] UsabilityInitiative extension is going to die

2010-09-20 Thread Guillaume Paumier
Hi,

Le lundi 20 septembre 2010 à 18:40 -0400, Aryeh Gregor a écrit :
> 
> Implying that particular groups of developers aim to suppress
> particular technical opinions, without naming the developers or giving
> any supporting evidence, is definitely trolling.  I think we'd all
> appreciate it if you stopped doing it.  You're clearly capable of
> stating intelligent opinions, and it's really not necessary for you to
> add veiled (or unveiled) accusations and other unproductive content to
> your posts.  This post would have been much improved if the second
> sentence were deleted, and your follow-up post could have done without
> language such as "artificial", "hasty", "appears to have no basis in
> reality" when speaking about a developer's actions.  It's not helpful.

I agree with most of what you say. However, it doesn't help that one's
(valuable) technical opinions are sometimes dismissed as "trolling"
based solely on the person emitting them, and not based on the merits of
the opinion (especially when the person is making efforts to be
productive).

Just saying the world's not black and white :)

-- 
Guillaume Paumier


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Re: [Wikitech-l] UsabilityInitiative extension is going to die

2010-09-20 Thread Aryeh Gregor
On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 6:07 PM, MZMcBride  wrote:
> I think nearly everyone agrees that most of this should be in core. Saying
> so is trolling, though.

Implying that particular groups of developers aim to suppress
particular technical opinions, without naming the developers or giving
any supporting evidence, is definitely trolling.  I think we'd all
appreciate it if you stopped doing it.  You're clearly capable of
stating intelligent opinions, and it's really not necessary for you to
add veiled (or unveiled) accusations and other unproductive content to
your posts.  This post would have been much improved if the second
sentence were deleted, and your follow-up post could have done without
language such as "artificial", "hasty", "appears to have no basis in
reality" when speaking about a developer's actions.  It's not helpful.
 Please consider this when you make future posts, and revise
accordingly.  Thank you.

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Re: [Wikitech-l] UsabilityInitiative extension is going to die

2010-09-20 Thread MZMcBride
Chad wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 6:07 PM, MZMcBride  wrote:
>> I think nearly everyone agrees that most of this should be in core. Saying
>> so is trolling, though.
> 
> Don't see how it's trolling. But then again, maybe I should
> defer to your expertise in the area.

I don't either. :-)

Creating an extension called "Vector" when there's already a skin called
"Vector" is absolutely needlessly confusing. This builds upon the confusion
of having a skin called "Vector" while having a sub-extension called
"UsabilityInitiative/Vector".

It creates more work in the future because there are now two extensions
(UsabilityInitiative/Vector and Vector) that have to maintained (translated,
etc.) and eventually cleaned up after when the code is finally put in core.
It also creates more work for wiki administrators who have to keep track of
what's what and install/maintain extensions that shouldn't be extensions in
the first place.

An artificial deadline has been erected for the release of MediaWiki 1.17
that appears to have no basis in reality (if there's an updated roadmap or
official target release date for 1.17, feel free to link me to it), but that
was the explanation I was given for the hasty changes. More discussion is
available here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/73030

MZMcBride



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Re: [Wikitech-l] UsabilityInitiative extension is going to die

2010-09-20 Thread Chad
On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 6:07 PM, MZMcBride  wrote:
> I think nearly everyone agrees that most of this should be in core. Saying
> so is trolling, though.
>

Don't see how it's trolling. But then again, maybe I should
defer to your expertise in the area.

-Chad

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Re: [Wikitech-l] UsabilityInitiative extension is going to die

2010-09-20 Thread MZMcBride
Chad wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 4:12 PM, Trevor Parscal 
> wrote:
>> I'm hoping these extensions, especially WikiEditor and Vector can be
>> examples of how to make use of ResourceLoader in extensions. Please
>> note: if you are working on code that is aimed at deployment this year,
>> you should not depend on ResourceLoader. We hope to have it running live
>> in November, but that's not a guarantee.
> 
> Is there any sort of timeline for moving this stuff into core? I don't
> see any (long term) reason to leave these as extensions.

I think nearly everyone agrees that most of this should be in core. Saying
so is trolling, though.

MZMcBride



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Re: [Wikitech-l] using parserTests code for selenium test framework

2010-09-20 Thread Dan Nessett
On Mon, 20 Sep 2010 22:32:24 +0200, Platonides wrote:

> Dan Nessett wrote:
>> On Sun, 19 Sep 2010 23:42:08 +0200, Platonides wrote:
>>> You load originaldb.objectcache, retrieve the specific configuration,
>>> and switch into it.
>>> For supporting many sumyltaneous configurations, the keyname could
>>> have the instance (whatever that cookie is set to) appended, although
>>> those dynamic configurations make me a bit nervous.
>> 
>> Well, this may work, but consider the following.
>> 
>> A nightly build environment (and even a local developer test
>> environment) tests the latest revision using a suite of regression
>> tests. These tests exercise the same wiki code, each parametrized by:
>> 
>> + Browser type (e.g., Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera) + Database (e.g.,
>> MySQL, Postgres, SQLite) + OS platform (e.g., Linux, BSD unix variant,
>> Windows variant)
>> 
>> A particular test environment may not support all permutations of these
>> parameters (in particular a local developer environment may support
>> only one OS), but the code mechanism for supporting the regression
>> tests should. To ensure timely completion of these tests, they will
>> almost certainly run concurrently.
>> 
>> So, when a regression test runs, it must not only retrieve the
>> configuration data associated with it, it must create a test run
>> environment (e.g., a test db, a test images directory, test cache
>> data). The creation of this test run environment requires an identifier
>> somewhere so its resources may be reclaimed when the test run completes
>> or after an abnormal end of the test run.
>> 
>> Thus, the "originaldb" must not only hold configuration data with db
>> keys identifying the particular test and its parameters, but also an
>> identifier for the test run that can be used to reclaim resources if
>> the test ends abnormally. The question is whether using a full wiki db
>> for this purpose is advantageous or whether stripping out all of the
>> other tables except the objectcache table is the best implementation
>> strategy.
> 
> Such originaldb would be empty for an instance used just for regression
> testing and could in fact only contain the objectcache table. If it's a
> developer machine he would use the originaldb for local testing, but a
> nigthly would not need to (in fact, errors trying to access those
> missing tables would be useful for detecting errors in the isolating
> system).

Sounds reasonable. Using this approach, here is how I see the logical 
flow of a test run. (NB: by a test run, I mean an execution of a test in 
the regression test set).

The wiki under test is set up with a master database consisting of a 
single objectcache table. The entries of this table specify a test run 
identifier as primary key and temporary resource identifiers as dependent 
fields.

Setup of a test run requires the creation of the test run temporary 
resources and a entry in the objectcache table. A cookie or other state 
is returned to the testing application. This state is provided by the 
testing application during the test run on each request to the wiki under 
test.

When a request is sent to the wiki under test, very early in the request 
processing (e.g., immediately after LocalSettings is processed) a hook is 
called with the provided state information as an argument that accesses 
the objectcache table. The extension function handling the hook switches 
in the temporary resources and returns.

After the test run completes, the testing application cleans up the test 
run by requesting the deletion of the temporary resources and the 
objectcache table entry associated with the test run.

In order to handle prematurely abandoned test runs, the objectcache table 
entry probably needs an entry that specifies its lifetime. If this 
lifetime expires, the temporary resources associated with the entry are 
reclaimed and the entry is delete.

-- 
-- Dan Nessett


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Re: [Wikitech-l] UsabilityInitiative extension is going to die

2010-09-20 Thread Trevor Parscal
  On 9/20/10 1:35 PM, Platonides wrote:
> Trevor Parscal wrote:
>> I'm hoping these extensions, especially WikiEditor and Vector can be
>> examples of how to make use of ResourceLoader in extensions. Please
>> note: if you are working on code that is aimed at deployment this year,
>> you should not depend on ResourceLoader. We hope to have it running live
>> in November, but that's not a guarantee.
> I hope that means we will be running 1.16wmf5 branched post-r72349 in
> November...
>
>
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That sounds like a Tim Starling question.

- Trevor

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Re: [Wikitech-l] UsabilityInitiative extension is going to die

2010-09-20 Thread Platonides
Trevor Parscal wrote:
> I'm hoping these extensions, especially WikiEditor and Vector can be 
> examples of how to make use of ResourceLoader in extensions. Please 
> note: if you are working on code that is aimed at deployment this year, 
> you should not depend on ResourceLoader. We hope to have it running live 
> in November, but that's not a guarantee.

I hope that means we will be running 1.16wmf5 branched post-r72349 in
November...


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Re: [Wikitech-l] UsabilityInitiative extension is going to die

2010-09-20 Thread Chad
On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 4:12 PM, Trevor Parscal  wrote:
> I'm hoping these extensions, especially WikiEditor and Vector can be
> examples of how to make use of ResourceLoader in extensions. Please
> note: if you are working on code that is aimed at deployment this year,
> you should not depend on ResourceLoader. We hope to have it running live
> in November, but that's not a guarantee.
>
>

Is there any sort of timeline for moving this stuff into core? I don't
see any (long term) reason to leave these as extensions.

-Chad

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Re: [Wikitech-l] using parserTests code for selenium test framework

2010-09-20 Thread Platonides
Dan Nessett wrote:
> On Sun, 19 Sep 2010 23:42:08 +0200, Platonides wrote:
>> You load originaldb.objectcache, retrieve the specific configuration,
>> and switch into it.
>> For supporting many sumyltaneous configurations, the keyname could have
>> the instance (whatever that cookie is set to) appended, although those
>> dynamic configurations make me a bit nervous.
> 
> Well, this may work, but consider the following.
> 
> A nightly build environment (and even a local developer test environment) 
> tests the latest revision using a suite of regression tests. These tests 
> exercise the same wiki code, each parametrized by:
> 
> + Browser type (e.g., Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera)
> + Database (e.g., MySQL, Postgres, SQLite)
> + OS platform (e.g., Linux, BSD unix variant, Windows variant)
> 
> A particular test environment may not support all permutations of these 
> parameters (in particular a local developer environment may support only 
> one OS), but the code mechanism for supporting the regression tests 
> should. To ensure timely completion of these tests, they will almost 
> certainly run concurrently.
> 
> So, when a regression test runs, it must not only retrieve the 
> configuration data associated with it, it must create a test run 
> environment (e.g., a test db, a test images directory, test cache data). 
> The creation of this test run environment requires an identifier 
> somewhere so its resources may be reclaimed when the test run completes 
> or after an abnormal end of the test run.
> 
> Thus, the "originaldb" must not only hold configuration data with db keys 
> identifying the particular test and its parameters, but also an 
> identifier for the test run that can be used to reclaim resources if the 
> test ends abnormally. The question is whether using a full wiki db for 
> this purpose is advantageous or whether stripping out all of the other 
> tables except the objectcache table is the best implementation strategy.

Such originaldb would be empty for an instance used just for regression
testing and could in fact only contain the objectcache table.
If it's a developer machine he would use the originaldb for local
testing, but a nigthly would not need to (in fact, errors trying to
access those missing tables would be useful for detecting errors in the
isolating system).


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[Wikitech-l] UsabilityInitiative extension is going to die

2010-09-20 Thread Trevor Parscal
  As I mentioned in a prior email, I have been converting 
UsabilityInitiative/* extensions to work with ResourceLoader, and in the 
process removing their dependency on UsabilityInitiative.php. Some of 
these extensions were not really using any functionality in 
UsabilityInitiative.php, so their "conversion" was more like cleanup and 
removing a line that included it unnecessarily. The remaining extensions 
(WikiEditor, Vector, ClickTracking and PrefStats) are now only 
compatible with MediaWiki 1.17 because they depend on ResourceLoader 
functionality.

I'm hoping these extensions, especially WikiEditor and Vector can be 
examples of how to make use of ResourceLoader in extensions. Please 
note: if you are working on code that is aimed at deployment this year, 
you should not depend on ResourceLoader. We hope to have it running live 
in November, but that's not a guarantee.

Please see the README for UsabilityInitiative 
(http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/UsabilityInitiative/README?view=markup)
 
which you will notice ends in calling out that these extensions should 
be moved. I've already moved Vector and WikiEditor, and the remaining 
ones will likely be moved soon if there are no objections.

This should put the last nail in the coffin for UsabilityInitiative. 
(the extension that is, the grant has been over for ages!)

- Trevor

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