Hallo Wikitech community,
Remind me please, were there ever any efforts to get client-side JavaScript
errors monitored centrally?
What happens currently is that JS code can frequently fail, taking down the
rest of JS on the page with it. It happens both with JS code properly
deployed from Gerrit and loaded by RL, but even more so with local gadgets,
Common.js, and user scripts.
The most frequent effects of this into which I ran are Visual Editor not
working at all and WikiEditor's toolbar not appearing in the source editing
window. There are many more.
On projects with a lot of editors and administrators, like the English and
the German Wikipedia, this will probably be quickly noticed and
fixed—sometimes fixed locally, and sometimes fixed in Gerrit and deployed
in SWAT. But in smaller projects it can fail for months without being
noticed. And when I say "smaller", I don't mean the tiny projects with
almost no editors—such a thing happened recently in the Japanese Wikipedia,
a top-10 project, and I helped administrators there to fix the buggy code,
which appeared in the second most-popular gadget.
I did this dozens of times, and Krinkle probably does this even more than
me. Often admins from different projects help each other, and it is great
that we have this mutual help in the community, but aren't there better
ways to catch such errors?
I remember there were discussions about this, but I don't remember what was
the outcome.
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore