On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 6:41 AM, Chad <innocentkiller(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Why? Their home wiki is already stored in CentralAuth,
as well as all
wikis they're already a member of. A db name column in user_newtalk
would be pretty useless.
Not all wiki farms will want to use CentralAuth; the difficulty in working
with it will likely make most wiki owners want to share the user table
instead. In fact, Brion recommended as much for new wiki farms that don't
have existing sets of users that need to be merged. If there is interest in
revamping CentralAuth to make it easier for the common man to use, then
maybe it will be unnecessary to develop a separate integration system for
wikis that share the user table.
Absolutely it should be in core. Right now, each time
an extension
(or core) author wants to do something with an interwiki site, they
usually reinvent the wheel every time. Having a centralized (CORE!)
methodology of obtaining a remote DB connection or API request for
interwikis would be a huge step in the right direction.
The thing about the core is that then you have to get consensus to do
anything major (or else it might get reverted), whereas with extensions, you
have more freedom. WMF and other wikis can always choose not to install an
extension; but if a feature they don't want to use is proposed to be added
to the core, people might view it as adding unnecessary complexity and
potential for unforeseen bugs to crop up, without any benefit to offset the
hassle. On the other hand, standardization can happen without features being
put into the core; for instance, whose wiki doesn't use the ParserFunctions
extension?
Maybe it's not so bad if people reinvent the wheel for awhile; it's better
than letting a feature go unimplemented because people couldn't agree on a
standard or didn't agree on whether they even wanted a certain feature.
Eventually, if a feature gets popular enough, there can be a merging of
frameworks. Also, the process of working on an extension gives the dev
opportunities to change his mind halfway through and switch to a different
implementation method without wreaking a lot of havoc, and wasting the code
review that had to be invested in making sure the original implementation
was OK (with extensions, code review just gets deferred until someone
suggests it be implemented on WMF). I guess another possibility is creating
a branch of the core that has interwiki integration capabilities, and then
merging it in when it's done.
You're right. But centralizing this sort of thing
makes long term
planning for that sort of thing easier. And by putting it in core you
get more eyes on it and hopefully more people caring :)
People care about the extensions that run on WMF sites, right? For purposes
of drawing eyes to it, that's almost as good as putting it into the core.
Don't get me wrong, I think it should go into the core, as long as it's a
good implementation.
-Tisane