On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 6:37 PM, Michael Dale mdale@wikimedia.org wrote:
The debug switch would modify the HTML output to point at the individual files with a GET seed ie myscript.js?<?php= date()?> or something of that nature bypassing the script loader altogether. The bulk of extra content is comments, code documentation and debug statements .. line preservation does not seem worth it. Debug output should be enabled via a GET debug argument, user preference or $wgConfigure variable.
So you end up with a user who says the problem goes away when they enable debug. Yet they can't provide useful debugging info with the failing version because it's all garbled minification output.
May I suggest an alternative perspective with respect to line numbering: Destroying line numbers doesn't reduce the post-gzipped size by much, it does not seem worth it.