On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 6:41 AM, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
Why? Their home wiki is already stored in CentralAuth, as well as all wikis they're already a member of. A db name column in user_newtalk would be pretty useless.
Not all wiki farms will want to use CentralAuth; the difficulty in working with it will likely make most wiki owners want to share the user table instead. In fact, Brion recommended as much for new wiki farms that don't have existing sets of users that need to be merged. If there is interest in revamping CentralAuth to make it easier for the common man to use, then maybe it will be unnecessary to develop a separate integration system for wikis that share the user table.
Absolutely it should be in core. Right now, each time an extension (or core) author wants to do something with an interwiki site, they usually reinvent the wheel every time. Having a centralized (CORE!) methodology of obtaining a remote DB connection or API request for interwikis would be a huge step in the right direction.
The thing about the core is that then you have to get consensus to do anything major (or else it might get reverted), whereas with extensions, you have more freedom. WMF and other wikis can always choose not to install an extension; but if a feature they don't want to use is proposed to be added to the core, people might view it as adding unnecessary complexity and potential for unforeseen bugs to crop up, without any benefit to offset the hassle. On the other hand, standardization can happen without features being put into the core; for instance, whose wiki doesn't use the ParserFunctions extension?
Maybe it's not so bad if people reinvent the wheel for awhile; it's better than letting a feature go unimplemented because people couldn't agree on a standard or didn't agree on whether they even wanted a certain feature. Eventually, if a feature gets popular enough, there can be a merging of frameworks. Also, the process of working on an extension gives the dev opportunities to change his mind halfway through and switch to a different implementation method without wreaking a lot of havoc, and wasting the code review that had to be invested in making sure the original implementation was OK (with extensions, code review just gets deferred until someone suggests it be implemented on WMF). I guess another possibility is creating a branch of the core that has interwiki integration capabilities, and then merging it in when it's done.
You're right. But centralizing this sort of thing makes long term planning for that sort of thing easier. And by putting it in core you get more eyes on it and hopefully more people caring :)
People care about the extensions that run on WMF sites, right? For purposes of drawing eyes to it, that's almost as good as putting it into the core. Don't get me wrong, I think it should go into the core, as long as it's a good implementation.
-Tisane