On 05/18/2010 08:53 AM, Michael Dale wrote:
But in general its probably better / easier for end users to just
identify their platform and whats not working, since its all code to
them anyway. If they are a developer or are going to do something
productive with what they are seeking they likely have the code checked
out locally and use the debug mode.
The problem here is Wikimedia sites. If you leave the debug mode off
and serve fully minified scripts on WMF sites, the hundreds if not
thousands of people who develop user/site scripts for them will have a
very hard time debugging anything that involves interactions with the
minified code. If you turn debug mode on permanently, you lose most of
the benefit of having a minifier to begin with (Wikimedia being the
single biggest user of MediaWiki).
Then there's also the problem that the MediaWiki environment on
Wikimedia sites can be quite different from a stock install, and
duplicating enough of it on a test wiki to be able to reproduce a
Wikimedia-specific bug may be quite difficult -- particularly so if you
have to do this before you even know where the bug occurs, because you
couldn't do any useful debugging due to the code being minified.
I'd like to second Aryeh's suggestion to at least tweak the minifier to
leave newlines intact (although collapsing multiple consecutive newlines
to one would be OK, I guess). That way users could at least set up
useful breakpoints and receive error messages that tell more than which
file the problem occurred in.
(Part of the blame here goes to the debuggers, of course. If common
JavaScript debugging tools like Firebug could do things like expand
minified code and set up breakpoints on individual statements rather
than just lines, minification would be much less of a problem for
debugging. But currently, as far as I know, they don't.)
--
Ilmari Karonen