On Mon, Dec 21, 2020 at 6:37 PM Jon Robson <jrobson(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
tldr: If you have built skins or use skins that are not listed on
MediaWiki.org, please
list them [4] and check that they work with current
MediaWiki.org. If you have always
wanted to build a skin try the new tool and give me feedback on how you get on! [3].
Longer version:
As part of my involvement in the desktop improvements project [1] I with the help of
many others have been trying to simplify the development of skins.
As part of this, much-needed maintenance has occurred in MediaWiki core with the
intention of making skin development easier.
As a personal goal, I wanted to prototype a tool to showcase the skins available in the
ecosystem, and finally with the downtime of the holiday period (no deploys!) I've
finally done that. It allows showcasing [2] and building skins [3].
While building this tool I was surprised to find that excluding forks of skins, there are
only __55 skins__ listed on
MediaWiki.org. Out of those, only 38 have been kept up to
date.
I can't believe that given the age of this project there are only 38 usable skins and
I am writing to you in the hope that:
1) You know of others that can be added to
MediaWiki.org in the "Skin"
namespace [4] Note, any edits to
MediaWiki.org will automatically get picked up by the
tool and listed.
2) If you build skins for closed source wikis, please consider publishing them over the
holiday period if you can!
3) If you have fix skins that do not work with latest MediaWiki so I can showcase them on
the new tool.
4) If you are inspired to make a new skin, possibly trying out the starter kit tool I
have created [3] which will construct a working zip file that can be added to your local
mediawiki and eventually github/gerrit and give me feedback via Phabricator/email/github
what can be improved.
I think a nice option for a tool (linter tool?) would be to ensure an
extension or skin using appropriate branch names, like REL1_34,
REL1_35, etc.
Several extensions and skins do not follow Mediawiki conventions. They
tell users to trust the developers' judgment, and not Mediawiki's
conventions. (See some comments for the Foregorund skin page).
They don't realize breaking Mediawiki convention break scripts like:
WIKI_DIR=/var/www/html/w
WIKI_REL=REL1_35
IFS= find "$WIKI_DIR/skins" -type d -name '.git' -print | while read -r
dir
do
cd "$dir/.."
echo "Updating ${dir::-4}"
git reset --hard HEAD && git pull && \
git checkout -f "$WIKI_REL" && git pull
done
Jeff