On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 7:31 PM, Michael Dale mdale@wikimedia.org wrote:
We would have the script_server be passed a unique variable per SVN version of the mediaWiki (like we currently do with the static js includes) If their browser treats a new url with different get parameters as the same as some older version resulting in a cache mismatch then that is bad...
Ideally we don't have broken transformations on our back end per our unique urls matched to the svn version of the file. Yes different output of js means different input for the client and yes different input could result in new unforeseen errors client side that don't manifest in the un-minimized code. We would of course want to do lots of testing with the minimized output.
Or we could just do ordinary minification, but not touch newlines (including ones that are part of comments). The benefit for debugging seems to outweigh the very marginal incremental improvements to page load time.