On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 2:07 PM, Jack Phoenix <jack(a)countervandalism.net> wrote:
....
What's common to third-party users of MediaWiki is
not just custom
extensions, but sadly core changes, or as they're better known, core hacks
-- unsupported changes to the core of the MediaWiki software. I think that
everyone will agree with me when I say that we will want to reduce the
amount of core hacking by third-parties and instead increase collaboration
with us, the upstream developers of MediaWiki.
....
Essentially I'd like to see all major third-party
users contributing code to
the upstream version of MediaWiki and everyone keeping their copies of
MediaWiki on the official MediaWiki Subversion repository at
svn.wikimedia.org....
....
Jack Phoenix
MediaWiki developer
I've been reading this discussion with interest and thought a few
updates/links might be useful:
Sam Reed has put together a list of the Wikia diffs that need to be
upstreamed[0], and Sean Colombo's working on it.
Markus Glaser is coming to the upcoming New Orleans hackathon[1] and
will chat about third party development upstream to MediaWiki SVN,
among other issues.
Olivier Finlay Beaton put together a survey of what versions of
MediaWiki are being run out in the wild[2] and found that the majority
are on 1.16.x. Some administrators stay on old versions because they
have extension compatibility issues, or because they don't know or
don't care that new versions are available. We should address those
obstacles in other ways. But to the extent that administrators don't
upgrade because of their core hacks -- that's the friction that Sean,
Jack, Reuben, Joachim, and Markus can especially help us reduce.
From outside our immediate community, an essay on the
cost of *not*
upstreaming[3].
[0]
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikia_code
[1]
http://mediawiki.org/wiki/NOLA_Hackathon
[2]
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Extension_support#What.27s_out_there
[3]
http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2011/09/01/the-cost-of-going-it-alone/
Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation