016-08-07 19:27 GMT+03:00 Daniel Glus danielhglus@gmail.com:
On Aug 7, 2016 12:16 PM, "Tobias Schönberg" tobias47n9e@gmail.com wrote:
It really seems like WMF should have a full time employee for Pywikibot (or if they already do, maybe another one).
Yes, agreed.
1- Pywikibot has the biggest number of open patchsets after mediawiki/core. You might say, it's okay. Pywikibot is completely volunteer-based but ratio of distinct users / open patchsets is horrifyingly high.
As someone who's submitted a few patches, I didn't experience *awful* delays, but looking at the open patchsets, I have to agree that the backlog is disturbingly large.
Thanks for bringing this subject up, Amir! I personally had reviews taking over a year. Obviously, by that time the change was long deprecated/useless.
I think a possible solution is empowering more people to review patch sets. Making a review guide would help a lot; publicizing the style guide would help as well.
I think there were a few steps that hurt PWB in the last few years: 1. Too much branching. For so many years we had both compat and core, now we went to 2.0/master (if i'm not mistaken). There isn't something wrong in branching itself, but when you report a bug as a user, you always need to know on what branch you are. Additionally, there have been instances where bug reports were... let's say, unwelcomed. For a (presumably) simple project, a linear development model, with stable releases and continuous development on top of that should be enough. Instead of backporting bugfixes, push the users to upgrade. 2. Concentrating on the framework and ignoring the scripts. The contributions to the scripts/ folder are few compared to the ones in pywikibot/. Still, many of the users, especially in smaller wikis, have little understanding of python beyond very simple changes and prefer to run already-written scrips.
I also have some other issues with certain strategic decisions, but I have no proof those were bad by themselves.
Regarding the proposed solutions, I am wary of the WMF "taking over" the development of pwb (call me old fashion if you like, but I'm still not over 2014). Also, more reviewers without a clear direction do not help. I used to have +2 a while ago, but I dropped out anyway because I couldn't understand where the main developers were taking pwb.
I'd much rather feel like contributing to a roadmap for development (so users can have a clear picture of were pwb is heading) doubled by some kind of commitee deciding on the debatable commits - all of those community driven, possibly with someone from WMF as facilitator if you think that would help.
Best, Strainu
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