The following three components in Bugzilla will no longer get a default
assignee. If you'd like to be notified when someone files a bug against
them, let me know and I'll put you in the default CC list.
OmegaWiki
Wikidata
Uniwiki
According to <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Uniwiki>:
Uniwiki is a project set up by Merrick Schaefer, Mark Johnston, Evan
Wheeler and Adam Mckaig to improve MediaWiki's usability for UNICEF
projects engaging young people in developing countries. These
extensions have also proven valuable to improve the usability of
MediaWiki for other users.
But I've been told bitrot has set into Unidata, so I'm not sure how
useful it is.
Mark.
We have about 150 MediaWiki patches in Bugzilla that await review. To
make reviewers' lives easier, we could install an interactive patch
review extension called Splinter on our Bugzilla installation.
A brief but old overview:
http://blog.fishsoup.net/2009/09/23/splinter-patch-review/
If you have a bugzilla.mozilla.org account you can try out the latest
version here (random bug & patch chosen as an example):
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=splinter.html&bug=652345&attachmen…
Brion wrote:
> Might also be worth adapting some ideas from it for CodeReview in MW
> (making cleaner annotations against bits of code would be nice)
We're going to get patches via Bugzilla from noncommitters for the
foreseeable future and this seems like a quick way to make that more
painless. If there's a good Bugzilla-integrated patch review tool
that's better than Splinter, tell me. The Splinter extension is running
on bugzilla.mozilla.org, which is at 4.0.1+. So it's maintained and
would be reasonable to install on our Bugzilla.
(This of course is all dependent on having sysadmin resources to check
out alternatives and install Splinter or whatever's deemed best.)
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
During my poll of developers about their Bugzilla settings, I was told
that the current maintainers of the following two extensions do not have
time to take care of them any longer and they need someone to step up
and maintain them:
EasyTimeline
APC
For what it is worth, EasyTimeline is deployed on WMF wikis (See
http://hexm.de/58 for an example from mlwiki).
Thanks,
Mark.
At the request of a few folks, I've done some research on how the open
source project Launchpad does code review and deployment.
In Launchpad, all developers are also code reviewers for about a day a
week. All developers write "merge proposals" and attach them to their
branches, and their colleagues review those branches and proposals
within a day. Code reviewing is not primarily a gate to keep bugs out of
code, but a social step, to get a second set of eyes on code, and to
spread knowledge around. After code review, and automated testing on an
EC2 instance, the developer lands the branch in trunk, a developer QAs
it, and it gets deployed onto production in a matter of days or hours.
A few key differences from MediaWiki:
* No volunteer reviewers, small volunteer contributor community
* Review trainees have already seen what a good code review looks
like, perhaps need less training
* Started with backlog of less than a week's worth of commits
I've stuck a more detailed description here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Sumanah/Launchpad-dev-process
in case people want to get some ideas before the code review discussion
tomorrow:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_review_management/July_2011_training
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
Helder started a discussion at
[[Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics#RFC:
_Should_MW_developers_drop_the_rendering_preferences_for_math.3F]].
I followed his link to this present discussion, and there I
followed the instructions on how to post to this list, and I
got an email telling me I am now authorized to post here,
and after that I spent my whole day trying unsuccessfully
to post here.
Helder doesn't seem to have informed this list of the
discussion he started there so that people here could
read that discussion or participate in it, nor did he say
anything that made it particularly feasible for people there
to post here. So just what his purpose was seems hard
to figure out.
The two discussions should not be separate. The issues
in this thread have been talked about frequently since
February 2003 on that wikiproject talk page. Various
views exist, but there is general agreement about the
less-than-perfect nature of existing system.
To me "displayed", as opposed to "inline" TeX looks very
good in Wikipedia articles. "Inline" TeX usually looks
about three or four times as big as the surrounding text,
which looks bufoonish. Simple things like a^b and a_b
are formatted wrong: obviously in both cases the a should
be at the same level as the surrounding text and the b
respectively higher or lower.
Making everyone use mathJax may be the solution, but
mathJax still has bugs. Wikipedia needs more sophisticated
behavior from mathJax than do other forums that use it,
such as stackexchange and mathoverflow.
After all the hours I've devoted to merely figuring out how
to post here, I am in no condition to do better than these
present comments. --- Mike Hardy
We all get too much Bugzilla mail. Often this is because you signed up
a long time ago as the default assignee for a component, or added
yourself to a cc list. It's time to prune these old lists, so that the
only bugmail you get is stuff that *directly relates to you*.
Today we made a change that may result in stopping bugmail you DID want,
so read on for explanation and instructions.
= Default Assignee changes =
RobLa suggested that, in most cases, the Bugzilla default assignee for a
MediaWiki component or extension should be no one (that is, the wikibugs
"no one in particular" user). Today Mark made that change, for
MediaWiki components and for the extensions that WMF sites use. You can
see what the old default assignees were here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MarkAHershberger/Weekly_reports/2011-07-2…
If you've been removed and you actually WANT to be a default assignee
for something, go ahead and add yourself back in. For example, maybe
Ryan Kaldari really wants every new WikiLove bug assigned to him. But
going forward, it seems to Mark & me that assignment should *mean*
something - it should mean that someone chose to assign the bug, and
that the assignee aims to address the issue.
= CC list email =
Once you're signed up for a cc list, you can't take yourself off; a
Bugzilla admin has to do it. So today, Mark is emailing the people who
are on cc lists, telling you what lists you're on, and asking you which
of those you really want to be on. Please respond and think about what
you really want. If you just want a regular overview of all the new
bugs in that component, set up a report to be emailed to you every week
using https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/editwhines.cgi .
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
http://wikimania2011.wikimedia.org/wiki/Developer_Days#Topics
These are the topics so far for the developers' hackfest, August 2-3, in
Haifa, Israel. Now's a great time for people to prepare sprints. A few
developers and I should prepare the code review training, Mark should
prepare bugs to smash, ops people who want us to fix IPv6 bugs should
put them all in one place, and so on.
Additionally, a few Mozilla developers might come, so I've been asked:
"Do you know about any particular Firefox issues that bug MediaWiki
developers? Can you think about any Firefox extensions that might be
beneficial for the movement?" Other than Firebug!
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
After getting an email that said:
> You are now authorized to post to the
> gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical newsgroup.
I made five separate attempts over a number of hours
to post. All unsuccessful. I had on-topic comments,
and I am unwilling to type them yet another time before
finding out whether this sixth attempt works.
---- Mike Hardy
A second issue that has been raised on the wiki is the poor quality of
math in PDFs generated from articles. The math shows up as a
low-quality bitmap which is very pixelated and noticeably different
from the body text. I wanted to pass it along to the list.
- Carl