On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 5:14 PM, Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote:
Yes, everyone's busy. Yes, there are more pressing issues (SUL, stable versions, you name it). Yes, MediaWiki wasn't developed as a media repository (tell me about it;-) Yes, "sofixit" myself.
Still, I ask: is this the best we can do?
No. We can do better. Both category handling and image handling are a complete mess and need to be reworked to have some level of features that doesn't require ludicrous amounts of manual or bot work to do things that should be one-click operations, or to find information that should be provided at first glance. We absolutely can and should do better.
The problem is . . . someone has to step up and do it, preferably someone who's willing and recognized as able to do large-scale rearchitecting of large and important subsystems. Frankly, I think that about limits our options to Tim at the moment. Some others, like Aaron or Werdna, are willing to do work like this (at least on some things), and others like VasilievVV have even tried to make a start on this very category of issue (he did image redirects, right?). But mostly either their work needs to be disabled by default for lack of polish or imperfect implementation, or it can't even be reviewed properly because Brion doesn't have time. From my perspective, it looks like Brion is much more willing to review big commits by Tim than anyone else, I guess because of some combination of a) he has to, Tim is a paid employee doing what he's specifically asked to and b) he doesn't have to look quite so closely because he knows he can trust Tim to do a good job overall. Both of which are perfectly natural and good reasons, but inevitably they limit things.
It just seems to me that we really don't have enough senior developers. Maybe we'll get another one later this year -- various Foundation statements have mentioned multiple developers to be hired in 2008. A paid junior developer is also much needed, for other reasons, and I'm not questioning the decision to do that first -- it will also give Brion more time since he won't have so many office duties -- but IMO this is pretty much how the facts lie. There's only so much possibility of having inexperienced to moderately experienced developers, whether volunteer or paid, write thousands of lines of code to revamp major features, and that's what this kind of complaint requires to be properly fixed.