Hey,
> I can think of a number of things that SMW does, unrelated to its core
goals:
SMW core could indeed be more lean.
Now, maybe the right solution is to split off all of this extra stuff into
> one or more other extensions, as was done with DataValues (and perhaps with
> Diff and the rest - I don't know if those started out as SMW code).
>
Diff is not related to SMW in any way.
DataValues is based on SMW code though not yet used directly by SMW. That
is something planned though.
> Personally, though, I think the better solution is to just view SMW as an
extension that does a lot of things, in the back-end and interface, related
to the storage of semantic data.
It is important to differentiate between the developer and the user views
on this. From a development perspective it makes a lot of sense to have
these things nicely kept separate.
>From a user perspective certain combinations of packages tend to be
desired. This is why software tends to have a build process, so the
selection of functionality needed by the user can be put into an easy to
use bundle that appears to be one piece of software to the user. And since
different users have different needs, you'd typically have a few variants
of this. For instance "SMW core" with just the core stuff, "SMW plus forms
and related stuff", and "ALL of the SMW things". Right now we are not doing
an as good job at providing such things as we could. SB is a step in the
right direction, though still far from what we could have.
>From a dev perspective it is important to keep district things separate, to
avoid not needed dependencies creeping in, and to reduce maintenance costs.
Since we have not all that much manpower for maintenance, we should be very
careful about this.
Some factors that are relevant in determining if something should go into
SMW core are size and code quality. In case of the Admin Links hook, which
is just a few lines of simple code, there is not all that much reason to
move it out. There is more PS code though, and it is more complex. Plus it
has design issues which combined with the lack of tests make it a liability.
In the case of the PS code, I'm not convinced that having a "PSSMW"
extension would be to much of an issue even without improving our current
build and publishing process. After all, there are many much smaller MW
extensions out there.
Cheers
--
Jeroen De Dauw
http://www.bn2vs.com
Don't panic. Don't be evil. ~=[,,_,,]:3
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