What you're saying, Trevor, makes sense, and I agree that we shouldn't have a "code purgatory". I won't presume to speak for Jon, but I imagine his somewhat provocative presentation of Mantle is due, at least in part, to frustration. About a year ago, the mobile web team was gung-ho to start moving parts of MobileFrontend into core. The first step in this process was to convert MobileFrontend into a skin, which we did. The second part was to move our template system into core, since most of the other parts depend on it and there's no MVC framework in core, especially not for client-side use. We put together an RfC on this,[1] and pushed it at the architecture summit. No consensus was reached on moving forward, and instead we reluctantly agreed to hold off on doing anything until Gabriel had a chance to implement an alternate solution for comparison. We recently tested Gabriel's implementation,[2] but are not totally satisfied with it or convinced that it is the best way forward (although Gabriel is still in the process of improving it).
After having lost most of our momentum, we recently pushed to prioritize core infrastructure work during mobile web's planning for the upcoming fiscal year, and even talked about breaking off part of the mobile web team into a "skin and infrastructure team". This too was basically shut down in favor of continuing work on mobile features. Then after suffering both of these setbacks we learn that there is yet another nascent proposal for a new core UI skinning infrastructure and even though it doesn't have a single line of code yet, you have been granted 80% of your time to work on it (rather than working on either of other two systems that have already been started). While it's great that you have invited the mobile web team to participate in this effort, I hope you can understand how this entire experience has been extremely demoralizing and frustrating for the mobile web team. Personally, I can't blame Jon for losing patience in the process and (purposefully or not) causing a stink about it.
That said, I hope we (the mobile web team) can put aside some of our feelings of being snubbed and outmaneuvered and work (yet again) towards reaching some sort of consensus on moving forward.
1. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/HTML_templating_library 2. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/HTML_templating_library/...
Ryan Kaldari
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 12:05 PM, Trevor Parscal tparscal@wikimedia.org wrote:
Indeed, this thread is a bit silly.
If someone wants to make an extension that provides a feature, and someone else wants to use it, there's nothing wrong with that. But why would such a thing need proposing?
If the point of Mantle is only to provide a way to bring templates to the client, then sell it that way. Look at the code in Mantle, and the way it's been pitched online and in person. It includes other things too, and has been repeatedly advertised as a general place where any code that is experimental can be put, while also simultaneously pushing for others to depend on it.
I have no problem with adding useful functionality to ResourceLoader, even doing so in an extension. I have a problem with trying to develop, what Jon himself call, a code "purgatory".
I'm happy to talk in person as well.
- Trevor
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:23 AM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
This whole thread seems a bit silly to me. We put stuff that should be in core into extensions all the time (for lots of different reasons). For example: WikiEditor, VisualEditor, Echo, MobileFrontend, JsonConfig, etc. So why is Mantle such a bad idea? There's no consensus on implementing templating in core yet, so it seems like a pretty cool idea to have an extension that other extensions can utilize for that technology in the meantime (instead of writing separate code for the same purpose). The JsonConfig and EventLogging extensions are basically the same idea,
right?
I think if Jon had named the extension "TemplateDooDad" (and hadn't emphasized the fact that he was avoiding putting the code into core), it wouldn't have raised anyone's hackles.
Ryan Kaldari
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 10:57 AM, Jon Robson jdlrobson@gmail.com wrote:
Trevor, That email you quote was about totally different code and a proposal to put it into Mantle and is off topic for this discussion.\T Trevor, please grab me in real life, so we can quell this misunderstanding asap, I feel for whatever reason I am not effectively communicating to you and possibly others and I would like to work out why and avoid future misunderstandings. I had hoped to grab you yesterday but I didn't get time because of the Flow release, hence my lack of reply to that thread.
The main problem Mantle currently solves is: "... we both had a need to pass templates from the server to the client via ResourceLoader. Mobile has been doing this for a year, and rather than another big project like Flow reinventing the wheel, we decided it was time to share code."
To put it this way:
- it would be irresponsible to put code for 2 templating languages
(Hogan, Handlebars) into core
- it would be irresponsible to put code to serve templates with no
templating library whilst the RFC about templating is still unresolved.
- it would be irresponsible for two teams to write exactly the same
code to serve templates to the client in 2 different extensions.
Your own team member Timo was strongly against me putting this code in core in current form and I agreed with him.
"We are paid, as professional software engineers, to write code that provides complete solutions, is stable, is clear how to use, doesn't break anything and meets MediaWiki's coding conventions"
This particularly offends me by the way. This is a no brainer and of course any code Flow or the mobile team is writing will meet coding standards and be stable. I'm not going to post bad code to Wikimedia servers just as I'm not going to post non-generic non-standardised code to core.
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