Hey Tyler,
Many of these issues have already been discussed on this mailing list. Read
Rob and Tim's emails from last week to start with. As explained in the
previous emails, the extension being deployed is Scribunto. Regarding
performance testing, Rob said this would be done once the extension was
deployed to
mediawiki.org: "From there, we'll need some time figuring out
the performance characteristics of this (making sure we're actually coming
out ahead) as well as converting some key templates over." Many of the
other questions are covered at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Scribunto.
And not to be overly dismissive, but the idea that Tim needs to prove that
en.wiki wants this feature is absurd. The template system on Wikipedia is
BROKEN. It takes over 30 seconds for the parser to render large articles,
and articles with a really large number of citation templates can't render
at all, they simply error with a timeout. The only reason Lua/Scribunto was
developed is because the en.wiki community has been vocally complaining
about this problem FOR 3 YEARS. Check out
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19262 for example.
Ryan Kaldari
On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 8:08 AM, Tyler Romeo <tylerromeo(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I think Yury has a point. Now would be a good time to
maybe discuss exactly
what's going on. As exciting a feature it may be, we cannot just "deploy
next week" and then have "the schedule for deployment not yet decided".
Stuff like this should have a legitimate plan. Furthermore, in alignment
with the previous thread on feature development, is there any hard
discussion on enwiki, etc. showing the users want this feature? I know sure
as hell that I'd love using this feature, but I don't represent all
template developers everywhere.
Some good questions we should probably answer (if they haven't been
answered already):
- Is Extension:Lua the extension being deployed? If so, why is it still
in Subversion and why is it marked experimental?
- What QA has been done on this extension? How many test cases have been
implemented?
- What are the performance impacts of using this v. regular parser
functions? (Also, what is faster, PECL or external interpreter?)
- Do global variables persist outside of an individual script, i.e., can
one global variable be used in multiple <lua> tags in the same template?
- Has there been any consideration of implementing a "standard library"?
For example, functions that will allow the creation of wikitables and
other
mediawiki syntax.
- What values for the various wgLuaMax* variables are we planning on
using on WMF wikis? Has there been testing done to determine what a
reasonable maximum call time is?
I probably should have looked into this more earlier, but it's been a busy
week for me and I haven't had much time.
*--*
*Tyler Romeo*
Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2015
Major in Computer Science
www.whizkidztech.com | tylerromeo(a)gmail.com
On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 8:27 AM, Tobias
<church.of.emacs.ml(a)googlemail.com>wrote;wrote:
On 08/22/2012 12:18 PM, Tim Starling wrote:
So my inclination is to push for deployment with
a minimum of
additional development work. But I'm not the target audience; my
inclinations have to be weighed against the needs of the users.
in the name of countless Wikipedians, who are struggeling with that
horrible Template/Magic word/ParserFunctions syntax, I say: thank you :)
This page is dedicated to its victims:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Church_of_emacs/Template_love
Cheers,
Tobias
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