On Mon, 13 Aug 2012 17:56:49 -0700, Rob Lanphier robla@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 11:03 AM, Jeroen De Dauw jeroendedauw@gmail.com wrote:
Can you be specific and point to these questions we've answered to vague, then I'll try to answer then in more detail.
Two places to start off with:
- In response to Brian Wolff's email. Many interesting questions
were redacted in Denny's response. 2. In response to Tim's July 18 comment here: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/14295/
We need generalizations provided by this patch. Yes, that's not specific at all to why and where we need them. You'd need to know that to verify we're not doing stupid stuff in Wikidata. However, these generalizations make sense on their own, and can be judged entirely loose from Wikidata.
Not really. Basically, what you're proposing is that these changes are necessary for Wikidata, that you don't have time to implement the full solution, and that's why we have to settle for a halfway solution instead of finishing the job.
I can understand not wanting the scope creep of "finishing the job", since there's not consensus on what that means. What Daniel suggested (which seems to also have the support of Chad and Aaron, at least) is that this is RfC material. If avoiding scope creep is the goal, then it becomes more important to understand exactly what Wikidata needs out of this patch, and that involves understanding the parts of Wikidata that use this.
Educating people on Wikidata internals really seems to be out of scope to me.
Given that the Wikidata code needs a full review by many of the same people that are asking about this particular change, doesn't that seem largely academic?
How do you figure this? My interpretation from the thread is similar to that of Denny - we're basically all agreeing that this change improves on the current system in various ways, but some thing it should tackle some issues it's not currently dealing with as well.
My reading is that folks like Daniel and Chad are conceding that the current system needs to be improved, and that this change *might* be a step in the right direction, but is probably not far enough to be worth dealing with the problems of doing this halfway.
Rob
I also feel that some of the changes that don't go far enough or don't look like the ideal I would have used if I wrote this code, are in areas such as database schema and potentially overall API. Areas which if this is committed now will require anyone who tries to finish the project to add in migrations, etc... just to fix the schema that should have been done right from the start. Also there is a key question undecided. Will the sites table be a first-class edited table. Or act like an index. Not deciding the way we treat this table right now will make it practically impossible to change that perception later on, and if we do decide that it should be more of an index when people have started writing editing interfaces on top of the table then we would practically have to rewrite it yet again.
Frankly some of the code sets off my rewrite nerves. And if I had the time/backing I'd collect all the requirements on an RfC page and write the new system myself.