On 14/06/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/14/06, Rob Church robchur@gmail.com wrote:
Also, what exactly is so slow about the transclusion? Raw inclusion of source code from another source is not typically a particularly expensive operation, when thinking of C's #INCLUDE, for example. Is it the finding of the transcluded page by name, or what?
What part of the email I sent implies it's "so slow"?
None. However, common belief appears to be that substituting commonly used, static templates is good for performance reasons.
Never underestimate the ability of humans to emulate that which goes "baa".
So, bots that transclude for performance reasons should be stopped? All the templates that are labelled "This template is a good candidate for subst:" should be rethought? Do you think your response represents "the developers'" opinion in general?
Substituting templates should be done when the template is being used as a boilerplate or in cases where, for instance, it'll never need to be changed again. Something like a vandalism warning, as an example, isn't going to need to be changed in all locations, so substituting it is more appropriate, not to mention, if it's a "testX" template, then the user can hit edit and start to understand how the site works, not be confronted with a brace substitution.
Templates as tags, et al. do need to be changed so that things are consistent, and should use regular transclusion.
I can't speak for the developers as a team. We all have our own opinions about what's "neat" and "clean" from a technical standpoint. For what it's worth, however, Brion Vibber has expressed a previous opinion that fragile editorial constructs are...fragile (spoken from the perspective of an editor, I think) and that policies shouldn't be dictated based on what people believe the server load to be.
Rob Church