Hi everyone,
Niklas brought this message[1] to my attention as something that probably deserves more attention than it has gotten, and I trust he's correct. What he said back in April: "I added wikitech-l to CC in hopes that people who have worked on localisation cache more recently would comment on whether [Adrian's proposed option to not merge messages in LocalisationCache] would make more sense nowadays."
Adrian: assuming Niklas and I are correct, my suggestion for moving this forward would be to turn your design thoughts into an ArchCom-RFC[2] for more explicit consideration by ArchCom. My attempt at abstract for those who haven't followed this:
Adrian was trying to figure out how to output pages that need to have multiple languages in a single page, which becomes difficult when fallbacks are missing. It results in some oddball behavior where placeholder text is output with incorrect i18n attributes in the surrounding div. He provided several alternatives for how to solve the problem in his mail to mediawiki-i18n. Niklas replied, providing the "if we stick with the status quo" answer (tag message strings in LocalisationCache with the correct language), and then is trying to figure out if the status quo makes the right space vs speed tradeoff given the quantity of languages and messages we have in 2016.
Adrian & Niklas: did I get the gist of it?
Rob
[1]: The April 2016 mediawiki-i18n thread: "Providing the effective language of messages" https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-i18n/2016-April/thread.html#1059 [2]: My unofficial guide on how to turn something into an ArchCom-RFC: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:RobLa-WMF/ArchCom-RFC