Hi Tyler, I understand you're frustrated here. As Jon says: "communication in the wikiverse is hard". Also, running a top 10 website is also hard.
Others have covered many of the other points, but I wanted to make sure I addressed one of the points that hasn't been covered yet: On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 2:08 PM, Tyler Romeo <tylerro...@gmail.com> wrote: > Changes to MediaWiki core > should not have to take into account extensions that incorrectly rely on > its interface, and a breakage in a deployed extension should result in an > undeployment and a fix to that extension, not a revert of the core patch. I wholeheartedly disagree with this. Changes to core should definitely take into account uses by widely-deployed extensions (where "widely-deployed" can either mean by installation count or by end-user count), even if the usage is "incorrect". We need to handle these things on a case by case basis, but in general, *all* of the following are options when a core change introduces an unintentional extension incompatibility: 1. Fix the extension quickly 2. Revert the change 3. Undeploy the extension until its fixed to be compatible with core #3 is last and least. It should be exceedingly rare that we undeploy a long-running extension because of a newly-introduced core change. It is often difficult to know exactly how core "should" be used, and sometimes, extension developers need to do things that seem hacky or wrong to achieve the desired result. It will often be the case that we'll need to continue to support misfeatures because breaking them would be too disruptive. Over time, if we improve our practices, this sort of tradeoff will need to happen less-and-less, but it does need to happen. Drawing the analogy to wiki world, what has happened here is exactly this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_discuss_cycle We're in the discuss part, which is actually where we should be. Rob _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
