On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 9:12 PM, K. Peachey p858snake@yahoo.com.au wrote:
That is apparently fixed in the newer versions, where you can set it up to hide the more advanced stuff on forms and stuff unless people want to use it and have forms that can only be touched if another one is. We do have a running testbed for the new version somewhere on the WMF servers, its address is in one of the bug reports requesting the upgrade.
New version of what? Bugzilla? I assume Mozilla's is roughly the latest version. That one is definitely better than ours, but still pretty confusing to normal people, compared to something like Launchpad or Google Issues.
On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 11:47 PM, Mike.lifeguard mike.lifeguard@gmail.com wrote:
Launchpad is (I think) still undergoing lots of changes. It may be opensourced now, but I'm not sure it is ready. I actually have UI complaints... since this request is at least in part coming from folks on the usability team, I wonder what they think of Launchpad. Maybe I'm hallucinating usability issues.
Well, workflow is just a lot smoother for common things. So for instance, to subscribe, just click "Subscribe" and it works immediately via AJAX. On Bugzilla you have to type in your e-mail address in the CC field, or scroll all the way to the bottom and check the box and hit Submit and hope you didn't change anything else by mistake at the same time, and hope that no one else changed anything at the same time so you avoid a mid-air collision. "Mark as duplicate" is similarly simple.
And it's just organized more intuitively. Compare:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/firefox/+bug/18305 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=235115
On Bugzilla you have to scroll through more than a page of mysterious fields (at my resolution) before you ever get to the actual bug description. Launchpad has most things neatly tucked away at the side. People are identified by names instead of e-mails. Status changes are noted inline in the comment that accompanies them instead of being hidden in a separate activity history. It's just . . . way better.
On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 2:17 AM, Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com wrote:
The historical position has been that absolutely nothing goes into the WMF software pool unless it is open source. As I recall, the only recognized exception was the closed source firmware running the routers at the server farm. By that standard, even a freebie is not good enough if the system is closed source.
Obviously this is not the current position, because the image servers run Solaris. The position was always to use open-source software *unless* no OSS met Wikimedia's needs. This was (is) the case for routers. It was also the case for Java before it was open-source, AFAIK just because Robert was more comfortable with Java Lucene than CLucene and you have to take volunteers where you can get them. Although the switch to Solaris wasn't discussed anywhere in public as far as I know, my impression is that it happened after we lost a whole bunch of images due to programming error, for the sake of being able to use ZFS snapshots.
I'm also not sure who would enforce such a policy with Brion no longer CTO. I note Priyanka's initial requirements just said "Free", and ^demon changed that to "Free (Beer and Speech)".
Personally, I would like to see Wikimedia stick to all OSS. Wikimedia's goal is to advance free knowledge, and supporting free software advances that goal, at least construed in a broad sense. Every high-profile user to any given open-source project helps that project and thereby OSS as a whole. But I'm not making the decisions here.