I'd like to see MediaWiki gain a more stable release process as well. I
think some of the primary things that we're lacking are:
- Where is QA? I mean, I know somewhere somebody is probably doing some
sort of testing, but having worked as a QA engineer I haven't seen anything
in MW that would resemble proper and traditional testing (excluding the
unit testing). Where's the list of test cases that need to be performed for
each release? How can one make new test cases and add them? etc. Maybe this
already exists, but if it does it's definitely not documented well enough.
- Stable sets of expected release features. In most companies I've
worked in, every single bug upon being reported is immediately scheduled
for a release, even if it just means deferring it to an unknown "Future
Release". But doing a quick search in Bugzilla shows MW has 5000+ bugs that
are not scheduled, some of which are even high priority bugs. I've probably
said this before, but it'd be good if consumers knew beforehand what they
may expect in the next MW release (even if it's only tentative) so that
they can debate whether or not to prepare for an upgrade. I've been told
before that that's what the release notes are for, but that's not the
point. Release notes currently only include stuff that's already done.
- Faster review process. This is something that's not at all easy, and I
know many are aware, but it takes a while to get reviews. I mean, there are
people like me who get notifications for every new change in gerrit, and
thus I'll see everything even if I wasn't added as a reviewer, but not
everybody does that, which leaves the question of how to get your stuff
reviewed and who to go to. There's a list of
MW.org that has some people,
but I've found it's usually not helpful until you're more involved and
actually know who those people are.
Other than those process issues, there are a few feature issues that IMO I
think are holding people back:
- As said, DB support, especially for high-use systems like Postgres and
MSSQL.
- Enterprise platforms. What if I want to deploy MW onto AWS or VMWare?
Many companies have pre-packaged systems for this. For example, at the
company I'm working at now, deploying their product to AWS is as easy as
copying the ID number into the web GUI and clicking deploy. Also, is there
any tracking on HipHop support?
- Non-PHP. This is probably far off in the future, but eventually it'd
be nice to be able to setup MW without having to deal with PHP at all,
i.e., have a configuration file in YAML or something. Even PHP frameworks
like Symfony have abstracted out the PHP, and that's a case where you're
actually developing *in* PHP. :P
*--*
*Tyler Romeo*
Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2015
Major in Computer Science
www.whizkidztech.com | tylerromeo(a)gmail.com
On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 1:01 PM, OQ <overlordq(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 11:39 AM, Mark A. Hershberger
<mah(a)everybody.org>
wrote:
But right now, I don't sense a huge amount of
friction between the WMF's
needs and the non-WMF MediaWiki-using community. The most that can be
said is that the WMF is focused on its sites and doesn't make third
party use a priority. This doesn't stop support for other databases,
though: Oracle, MS SQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, or even my recent changes to
separate out DB schema changes in MySQL.
Yes, unfortunately schema changes and other DB related changesets tend
to only get applied to MySQL/SQLite, and the other DBs tend to get
ignored or lag behind by a few months. That's about my only gripe,
that, and that setting jenkins up for these other backends was never
completed.
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l