Re: [Wikitech-l] Code review of the Wikidata code

On 17 May 2013 16:57, Denny Vrandečić <denny.vrandecic(a)wikimedia.de> wrote: I read half of the report. Here is what I got out of it: * We should do dependency injection to make code testable * We should adhere to the single responsibility principle to make code testable and less complex * MediaWiki in many places (special pages, api, hooks to name few) makes it impossible or at least very hard to do the above for most classes They proposed a solution (work around in Wikibase) to allow writing better code in Wikibase. In section 4.1.6 it reads "The sketched approach fulfills all presented requirements: The dependency injection mechanism is kept simple and easy to understand". But as a reader I did not understand how it works or what would be the practical gains for the code complexity that the solution itself introduces. I would attribute some part of this to the many typos, mistakes and non-fluent language in the text and examples. One example: "For example, if the a DependencyManager as configured in Illustration 1: DependencyManager is asked to retrieve the object with the key “mail”, it will ask the registered DatabaseBuilder to create that object and return it." I am curious whether there was any discussions if and how these issues could be fixed in MediaWiki core? Or do we need[1] to figure that out on our own? [1] I see that I already jumped on the "how to get there" part, but I guess I should first ask: is there sufficient mass that thinks there is an issue and that the issue should be fixed? I think that there is definitely a need for core to adopt better coding practices to reduce code complexity and allow easier unit testing. Just like the move from svn to git and gerrit, it will need a lot of effort and can annoy people, but in the end we will be better than before. -Niklas -- Niklas Laxström