[Wikitech-l] “Easy” Bug Triage meeting notes

This past Wednesday, we had our second IRC triage. The focus was on triaging bugs marked “easy”, verifying that they were still bugs and making sure they were actually something a new coder could do.

This meant we had a larger number of bugs to cover. I had planned only 2 minutes per bug in order to get through all of them in an hour which caused problems. This short time limit created some problems which means I'll have to be careful to restrict the number of bugs in the future, or tell people the time for the triage will be longer than one hour.

Still, despite the problems, hosting the triage in IRC meant that some developers interested in MediaWiki that Sumana invited were able to watch and volunteer developers were able able to participate.

Before talking about the ones that are already done or that we decided were not something a new developer should attempt, I'll give you the list of bugs that we confirmed as “easy”:

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/25909 Add a drop-down list for the tags in RecentChanges and NewPages

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/26470 Add toggle for checkered or transparent image background on file description pages

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/28162 Installer does not respect initial DBport declaration

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/28173 Postgres defaults to a unix socket - mention in install?

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/28296 Installer should honor &uselang= parameter

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/28981 handle diffonly param on diffs between deleted revision

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/29110 $wgFeedDiffCutoff doesn't affect new pages

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/29311 [OutputPage] Create a method to remove items from mModules

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/19295 Navigation headings should not be lower-cased in German (and other languages)

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/8178 [low enhancement] Make table of contents for category pages: Subcategories, Pages, Media

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/21511 Document all configuration variables (usable in LocalSettings.php)

By walking through bugs in this way, we were able to close a few right away as invalid or already fixed:

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/23442 javascript error in examine mode

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/27394 Message "lastmodifieddat" should be in user language instead of for content

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/27047 Nicer design for pre elements in Vector

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/25839 Add class for block ending time <span> element

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/22770 wrap rights on GlobalGroupPermissions into a CSS class

(Had a patch that looked usable, but yesterday, after the triage, DieBuche pointed out that creating a new CSS class wasn't necessary.)

These next ones had patches that needed to be to be reviewed and applied:

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/28838 Remove redundant IE-CSSFix rules from monobook/main.css

Applied in r91742

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/28147 MediaWiki:Centralauth-login-global - rewording suggested to make it more concrete.

Applied in r91706, fixed up by SPQRobin in r91733.

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/27894 Move edit on double-click event listener down to div#bodyContent

Brion and Krinkle have been reviewing the patch but since the original submitter hasn't replied for 2 months (despite other recent activity on the bug), this is a good place for another developer to jump in and take over the work.

Of course, when you're looking over “easy” bugs, some of them get fixed soon after:

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/23086 [extensions] AbuseFilter config diff date and time should use user preference instead of UTC

SPQRobin fixed in r91619

And then there were the ones that were marked “easy” but, after discussion, really weren't:

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/13862 Add a horizontal table of contents to Special:SpecialPages

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/20781 Move 'mainpagetext' message to installer's .i18n file once it exists

(Yes, this is easy, Except that it needs coordination with Translatewiki.net. If we could move all of the MessagesXX translations to Installer.i18n.php in one move, it wouldn't cause any headaches for translators.)

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/24159 Remove uses of the error suppression operator

(Most of the low hanging fruit has been done here. The ones remaining can be a bit remaining can be a bit tricky.)

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/27501 List categories from foreign file repositories on the File description page

(Need to rewrite the way the description page is fetched from the foreign repo. Can be done via the API.)

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/27545 Extension:reCAPTCHA has badly worded message

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/12532 File links on image description page should be in alphanumeric (alphabetic) order

(Could be easy, but requires one to make sure you don't do something stupid with the db query. A-Z Sorting all linked pages is slow/unindexed, sorting only the first (random) 200 entries is confusing for the user.)

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/29290 continue does not work in same cases for prop=iwlinks&iwcontinue and list=iwbacklinks&iwblcontinue

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/26597 Allow toggling of persistent cookies ("remember me") in API action=login

(Sam's initial fix was reverted, so maybe not so easy.)

Thanks, everyone, for helping out!

Mark.