Bugs item #1988912, was opened at 2008-06-09 15:58 Message generated for change (Comment added) made by cosoleto You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=603138&aid=1988912...
Please note that this message will contain a full copy of the comment thread, including the initial issue submission, for this request, not just the latest update. Category: General Group: None Status: Closed Resolution: Fixed Priority: 5 Private: No Submitted By: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody) Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody) Summary: Adds revision number after custom edit-summaries
Initial Comment: Even when a custom edit-summary is provided as the second argument to
target.put(newtext,"My edit summary")
The bot will automatically add a string identifying the SVN revision to the summary
"My edit summary [r5544]"
While I can see that for some commonly used bots, some projects would like to see this information, it shouldn't be appended in the general case as it needlessly reduces the flexibility of the library.
It can be trivially fixed by changing lines 1235 and 1236 of wikipedia.py as attached but I don't have commit access.
Yours en:wikt:Conrad.Irwin
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Comment By: Francesco Cosoleto (cosoleto)
Date: 2008-06-12 06:57
Message: Logged In: YES user_id=181280 Originator: NO
Wiki want appear simple and accessible. I think it's better users see a history page without 4 or 6 or 8 strange numbers rather then with numbers. This I mean with "impact".
Nice the new "Submit New" page, good job. Impossible don't read it.
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Comment By: Merlijn S. van Deen (valhallasw) Date: 2008-06-10 23:07
Message: Logged In: YES user_id=687283 Originator: NO
Nobody was me, sorry for that.
Yes, we can do that. And yes, bot owners can change code, that's true too. Yes, we can add BUGS documentation. But honestly, do you think anyone will read it? Just look at all the badly licenced images on wikipedia...
And I don't think this impacts wikipedia readers, actually. No data is lost by adding the revision info, as far as I am aware...
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Comment By: Francesco Cosoleto (cosoleto) Date: 2008-06-10 12:08
Message: Logged In: YES user_id=181280 Originator: NO
Hey Nobody (Nicolas?). We can invite the reporter to contact the bot owner too, I don't see the problem. I don't think adding revision number in edit summary or in another wiki pages improve bug report quality as rarely you see URLs here. Bot owners can change the code too.
What about add a BUGS (or BUGS.txt for Windows users) file in source (examples: curl/BUGS, sed/BUGS, linux-2.6.22.17-0.1/REPORTING-BUGS)? It can help a lot and surely no impact on Wikipedia readers.
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Comment By: Rotem Liss (rotemliss) Date: 2008-06-10 11:56
Message: Logged In: YES user_id=1327030 Originator: NO
I reverted for now the addition of revision number in r5547, according to the discussion in this bug.
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Comment By: NicDumZ — Nicolas Dumazet (nicdumz) Date: 2008-06-10 11:49
Message: Logged In: YES user_id=1963242 Originator: NO
Or we could require any support request to be posted along with the results of "python version.py".
SourceForge sucks, but allows us to inject brute HTML into some pages : I have modified the "Submit new" interface when you try to submit a new bug, try it ! "Feature requests, patches, and support requests" trackers were not modified. Please tell me your thoughts.
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Comment By: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody) Date: 2008-06-10 00:13
Message: Logged In: NO
The only reason for this seems to be that it helps with pywikipediabot technical support. This is not (in my opinion) a good enough reason. The wikis onto which these revision strings are being pasted have, in general, no interest in what is running on them - otherwise we'd all have to put our browser string into the edit-summary so we knew which browsers couldn't handle which characters, etc.
I do not object to the appending the revision number by default, but there has to be a way to turn it off. In many cases it is not relevant, and possibly misleading. For example I'm using the pywiki framework as the last stage in generating indices for Wiktionary - it is far more relevant to me to know which version of the database-dump, the dump-cleaner, dump-parser, index-splitter, and which sorter and formatter were used in the process, than it is for me to know which version of pywikibot happened to do the 'page.put(file.read(),"With custom edit summary ;)")' equivalent on the end. (Yes I know it's a lot of processes, but it makes each step quick enough that I can re-run each time I want to change something quickly.)
There are a number of ways it can be turned off, perhaps a config variable - an optional parameter to page.put() - a function that people can call to say "be_annoying(False)" - or (ideally) all of the above, though I feel that people will given the option start to use it automatically, just another chore that must be done to get things to work nicely.
I'd be much more in favour of something that automatically generated a warning if the "svn info -r HEAD" gave a different version number from "svn info" (though I'd like to be able to turn that off too).
en:wikt:Conrad.Irwin
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Comment By: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody) Date: 2008-06-09 21:27
Message: Logged In: NO
@cosoleto
You can reject a bad reported bug within 1 minute, write to reporter to run version.py....
yes, /if/ the reporter is the bot owner, which not always is the case.
The system as it is now does not decrease flexibility (Yes, it adds a string. That does not disable anything...), but it does make identifying old bugs a hell of a lot easier (you *really* don't want to know how many people are using the old 'stable' revision). I would support making it a config option, or logging the revision information elsewhere.
If you would rather create a separate page 'Special:MyUser/PWB_log' or sth that logs edits/bot runs, fine with me.
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Comment By: Russell Blau (russblau) Date: 2008-06-09 21:14
Message: Logged In: YES user_id=855050 Originator: NO
I agree with removing the version number from the edit summary, except possibly for the bare default string noted by rotemliss.
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Comment By: Rotem Liss (rotemliss) Date: 2008-06-09 19:37
Message: Logged In: YES user_id=1327030 Originator: NO
I also think that the appending of the revision ID to the edit summary is not necessary.
Note that the patch suggested in this bug seems to append the revision ID only to the *default* edit summary, i.e. "Wikipedia python library". Most scripts don't use this summary, and they shouldn't.
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Comment By: Francesco Cosoleto (cosoleto) Date: 2008-06-09 19:29
Message: Logged In: YES user_id=181280 Originator: NO
I am sorry, but I don't think this commit is fine. You can reject a bad reported bug within 1 minute, write to reporter to run version.py.... A good edit summary uses a language intelligible by everybody, no messages direct to us.
I added in meta instructions about how to report a bug (http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Using_the_python_wikipediabot&am...). It can be updated, translated in other languages. That is a good beginning. Please, think it over.
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Comment By: NicDumZ — Nicolas Dumazet (nicdumz) Date: 2008-06-09 18:15
Message: Logged In: YES user_id=1963242 Originator: NO
And now I see that this patch is only meant to remove the revision number on custom edit summaries, meaning that most of our scripts will still show [rXXX] after this patch, iirc. If it is the case, I'm not opposed to this patch.
Any other inputs ? valhallasw maybe ?
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Comment By: NicDumZ — Nicolas Dumazet (nicdumz) Date: 2008-06-09 18:10
Message: Logged In: YES user_id=1963242 Originator: NO
That's a behavior introduced in r5523.
While I do agree that this might be sometimes inducing, it's a very, very reliable way to know if the bot is running a decent version of the bot.
We are being reported a lot of false positives lately, and honestly, wasting an hour trying to reproduce a reported bug, when the reporting user simply comes a few days later "oh, finally I tried reading the manual : updating to the last svn version fixed my problem" is annoying.
I personally think, as both a developer and a bot owner, that the induced bot owner disagreements are minor compared to the time the developers will save. I might be wrong on that point, and any example of a very annoying edit summary case is welcome to prove me wrong; but until then, I don't think that this change is going to be reverted.
Thanks...
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You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=603138&aid=1988912...