On Thu, 2023-04-13 at 20:06 -0700, bawolff wrote:
"I think
there are lots of promising opportunities to incentivise
people to pay off technical debt and make our existing stack more
sustainable. Right now there are no incentives for engineers in
this regard."
Interesting. Personally to me, it can sometimes feel like we never
stop talking about technical debt. While I think paying off technical
debt is important, at times I feel like we've swung in the opposite
direction where we are essentially rewriting things for the sake of
rewriting things.
"Technical debt" spontaneously brings the following items to my little
mind. They should not be about rewriting but rather "maintenance":
* librsvg for SVG rendering is a five year old version:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T193352 /
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T265549
* Graph extension on old Vega version 2.6.3: see subtasks of
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T292341
* Scribunto extension on old Lua version 5.1 (last 5.1.x release was
in 2012):
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T178146
* 3D extension on a five year old three.js library in
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T277930#7636129
* Removing the OpenStackManager extension from
wikitech.wm.org:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T161553
* Removing WVUI from MediaWiki
core:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T310244
* Replacing jsduck with JSDoc3 across all Wikimedia code bases:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T138401
* Undeploy VipsScaler from Wikimedia wikis:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T290759
*
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T151393 (a non-public task)
This is not a complete list. Plus there are also separate "waiting for
someone to make a decision" and "improving communicating & documenting
already-made decisions" categories which would be different lists.
Of course there might be valid reasons not to look into some of this
technical debt (other higher priorities, high risk, complexity, etc).
Cheers,
andre
--
Andre Klapper (he/him) | Bugwrangler / Developer Advocate
https://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/