On 08/23/2013 06:31 PM, Yury Katkov wrote:
Of course, after some time the extension will stop working because of ugly hacks that will definetely appear in the code.
Another and more proper solution is not so fast, that is: to lobby the proper ACL support in MediaWiki core before starting development.
+1
Markus Glaser and I have discussed precisely this as one of the biggest hurdles for Corporate adoption of MediaWiki. There are a lot of things to do in the MediaWiki space but, as you point out, this is one that we need developers outside the WMF for.
MediaWiki is used as an enterprise wiki and the impossibility of good ACL should not be considered as not some kind of philosophy of the software (as some people claims) but as a bug that needs fixing.
+1 (again. That makes 2 points for Yury, so far.)
So if -- as many of us on the -enterprise mailing list agree, I think -- this is a bug that needs fixing, how are we going to fix it?
That is, where is the money to pay for developer time going to come from?
The release manager contractor[1] that the WMF is funding this year is meant to be finding funds outside of the Foundation to sustain release management long term. One way to do that is to begin extending MediaWiki in ways that enterprises would be willing to fund -- say, for example. through developing ACLs.
If we can find some MW developers interested in working on adding this to core, and the money to fund those developer's work, the problem then becomes coordinating their work and making sure it has real momentum.
Thoughts?