Yesterday I ran a triage with Tomasz Finc, PediaPress (PP), and members of the community on the Collection extension -- the tool that WMF sites use for creating PDFs as well as ZIM (http://openzim.org/) files.

While Tomasz and I would have liked to get more MW developers to pick up bugs, I was happy that to actually have some feedback from the PP developers that will help us point to easier problems to solve in the extension.

Also, due to personnel changes at PP, no one there had SVN commit access. We were able to begin the process of resolving this and, hopefully as a result, we'll get problems with the extension addressed much more quickly.

You can find the lightly commented etherpad for the triage here: http://hexm.de/6b

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/28206 -- PDF generation does not support Complex Script Wikis

We started off talking about several bugs that can all be summed up under #28206.

Since we support several different languages with not-very-well supported PDF creation tools and some without PDF creation support at all, we are pushing the limits of the current PDF creation tool.

After we discussing this, Volker Haas (a PP developer) said that the underlying tool, ReportLab (http://www.reportlab.com/), was being pushed to its limits and needed to be "rewritten from scratch".

PP doesn't have the resources to work on this right now, so I updated the bug and assigned it to Tomasz so that he could begin to figure out how we could solve it.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/27462 -- <noinclude> showing in PDF

After input from PP, this bug looks like a relatively easy to fix on the MW site. Sumana tagged it as such.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/28060 -- Collection extension should not add chapters in reverse order https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/28118 -- The path to images

Chris Kepper (a PP developer) said he would look at these, but also confirmed that #28118 should be easy.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/30511 -- Collection extension should place time stamp of revision extracted into the offline file

Jessie Wild (Special Projects Manager in the Global Development at WMF) requested this so that it would be easy to date the time a collection was made.

The PP developers also confirmed that this one would be easy for a MW developer to pick up -- and it doesn't involve PDF creation, making it a particularly juicy target.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/21653 -- Creating a PDF with collection extension does not render the <pages> tag hook from proofread page extension

At first, I didn't understand why this was needed. Luckily helderwiki from ptwikibooks was in the triage and was able help me understand its real need.

Ralf Schmitt (a PP developer) said he would work on this if time permits.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/22707 -- Cascading page protection for /Print template subpages

Since this one can be solved by any MW programmer (but it involves hooks and permissions, so I hesitate to tag it "easy"), I unassigned it from the PP developers.

Ralf Schmitt suggested that some of the concerns about hijacking a page could be addressed by having a "See what this page looks like printed" mode.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/28064 -- Collection extension needs some way to credit original authors of a work

Since helderwiki (mybugs on bugzilla) was in the triage, xe took the chance to champion this bug. There is no established established way of tracking non-wiki authors in MW, so there wasn't anything that the Collection extension could do here right now. helderwiki tracked down Bug #27629 (https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/27629 "Summary of page editors/authors") and added it as a dependency for the bug.

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/27952 -- openZim export should not drop categories

There was some confusion about this one. I gave it back to Tomasz so he could get some clarification from ErikM for what was needed.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/21504 -- Collection PDF generation doesn't handle <ruby> elements

Can't test since URL doesn't work. Tagged "testme" and asked if someone could attach a testcase to the bug for future reference.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/28061 -- Collection extension doesn't sort chapters when the user clicks on "Sort alphabetically"

Volker Haas said this one was really a UI bug -- something the PP developers were currently working on.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/26533 -- Collection extension should accept lists of chapters generated by templates (e.g. expanding templates of a collection page before loading the collection)

Resolved WONTFIX by Ralf Schmitt because of the complexity involved.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/20616 -- Name of excluded-in-print category cannot start with a namespace name

Resolved WONTFIX by Ralf Schmitt since everthing was working as designed.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/26330 -- collection contents lost when only loading js via https

Resolved WORKSFORME

Thanks to all who participated. There are a couple more followups on this triage, but those will wait for another email.

Mark.