Chris Seaton wrote:
On Fri, 2003-10-31 at 00:29, Tim Starling wrote:
Is there anyone out there who has considered
contributing to the
MediaWiki PHP script, but decided it against for reasons such as:
* Don't know PHP/MySQL
* Poor documentation, can't understand the code
* Wouldn't know where to start
* Don't have a test server
* Don't have CVS/server access, and you find contributing otherwise to
be tedious and frustrating
Or perhaps you've contributed on occasion but you're deterred from
contributing again for reasons such as those above?
I know PHP, MySQL, CVS, HTML et cetera all to a reasonable standard, and
thought you would all be gagging for me.
I tried to start developing, but found myself largely ignored. I asked
for suggestions as to where to start, what were the areas that needed
work, but was just vaguely pointed towards the bug reports.
If someone had said you can do X - something attainable within a few
hours - I would have probably been hooked.
I made one commit to CVS, but it still hasn't gone onto the English
Wikipedia (it was only one line).
That's why I gave up trying. Anyway, that was the summer holidays. Now I
at Uni with much less free time.
My pointers:
- Be very enthusiastic when someone comes forward
- Give them something to get hooked on
- Access to a test server
Thanks Chris, your points are well taken. A few notes:
Pushing a feature right through to the live version currently takes a
fair bit of work, and knowledge of our opaque development process. But
seeing your feature hit the live version is a real buzz -- it makes the
hard work worthwhile. Perhaps Brion and I could help out with getting
new features up ASAP.
I found the lack of access to a test server very difficult when I was
first starting. But giving people SSH access to larousse carries with it
all sorts of security/trust implications. For example:
* The live scripts are readable by all, and often writeable by all. This
includes the non-root database passwords. So as a result, anyone with
SSH access to larousse also has full access to the en: database
* All the server logs are readable by all.
This makes people with larousse access effective editorial
administrators, capable of violating the privacy of editors in various ways.
Perhaps we could give people access to larousse, but not give them
wikidev group membership -- instead give them a different group. Then we
could carefully set up the permissions and groups so that these people
have full access to the test database, the test script directory, the
server log and the debug log for test, but not to the main database. We
would also have to be careful with copies of LocalSettings.php in our
home directories.