Sumana: we can revisit that once the project's complete. ;-)
Daniel: It's no secret that I'm not a big fan of git (let alone gerrit,
which won't even _load_ when using IE9's default rendering mode), but you
almost convinced me there. For now, I think we'll stick with SVN because
it's what I and Lewis are familiar with; of course, I hope that the project
matures so that one day I won't be needed at all.
Platonides: I don't deny what you're saying at all...but in all honesty I
pretty much lost the passion for contributing code after the -- rather
sudden -- transition to git, because it overcomplicated what was once a
simple and working workflow. Yes, it's horribly selfish for me to say this,
but then again, most MediaWiki developers are familiar with SVN and I want
to be able to contribute, too.
I find the addition of MediaWiki 1.18.1 in r5 quite
confusing
What's confusing about it? The official wikiHow codebase (as in the
codebase powering
wikihow.com) is based on 1.12 and we want to ditch it
altogether and find better approaches than over 9000 core hacks, which is
why we chose to use the most recent stable edition of MediaWiki, which is
1.18.1, as the basis for the new and improved wH codebase.
Currently, diff -ur wikihow-src
wikihow-read-only/wikiHow/ contains lots
of unrelated changes.
How is one expected to make sense of it?
Are you
trying to diff the official version(s) against ours? If so, that
probably explains why you're seeing a lot of unrelated stuff. We're keeping
official releases around so that people have an interface for viewing
changes between (any) given weekly code releases. The changes we've made to
wikiHow extensions, let alone the changes we _plan_ to make, are so big
that diffs between the official releases and our versions are basically
useless.
Greg: Recruiting more people, participating in code review, testing
code, and of course, writing code are just some of the ways to help out!
I've tried to get some non-technical people interested (with very little
success so far...) as there are plenty of tasks for newbies (such as
updating indentation to use tabs instead of spaces and whatnot) to do, let
alone for experienced programmers, such as yourself. Ping me or Lewis
somewhere if you want commit access -- we'd be thrilled to have you onboard!
Having more info about the project on
MW.org, especially in the context of
WikiProject Extensions, would be splendid -- as people are likelier to read
such more official (so to say) pages than my user subpages. ;-)
Thanks and regards,
--
Jack Phoenix
MediaWiki developer