On Friday, Oct 31, 2003, at 02:44 US/Pacific, Alfio Puglisi wrote:
On Thu, 30 Oct 2003, Fred Bauder wrote:
The lack of comments on what the purpose of most
of the code is
pretty much
precludes almost anyone who didn't write it from participating. All
changes
together with comments should also be dated.
Same argument here: when writing my toy wiki parser, I checked out
phaseIII software from CVS to get ideas from the code. I was amazed at
the
lack of comments - given a target to search for, finding the right bit
is
very time-consuming, unless you already know where to look at.
(disclaimer: I'm not a PHP expert, but I thought that I could parse it
quite well)
A great project for someone who'd like to get into MediaWiki
development would be going through the code and documenting it, asking
"what the HECK does this spaghetti code do?" to the list whenever
needed.
Not only would this be a great learning exercise, but it should help
identify a lot of problem spots with dead, duplicated, or dangerous
code.
In addition to the missing in-code documentation, there's some meagre
docs on meta that need to be beefed up:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_architecture
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)