On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 4:33 AM, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
I personally don't like the "interwiki
integration", as pretty much
nearly everything has to go through one of these methods:
1. Pulling from all wikis
2. Pushing to all wikis
3. Having central backend
All these have their own nightmares, and separation was quite often
preventing us from madness. CentralAuth has added its own share of
inefficiencies that nobody has been working on yet. Having shared data
between multiple systems isn't the easiest problem usually, and it
needs more attention than a single-time feature deployment.
I'm hoping that CentralAuth can either be made easier for non-WMF wiki
owners to install/configure/use, or that another, less-WMF-specific, and
easier-to-work-with extension (or core functionality!) can be developed to
fulfill the functions it performs, and more. Do you have any thoughts on
which of those three options above are preferable to use in which
situations? I'm presently working on Special:InterwikiWatchlist and
Special:InterwikiRecentChanges pages that use shared global
integration_page, integration_recentchanges, integration_watchlist, etc.
tables. These are just like the existing page, recentchanges, watchlist,
etc. tables, but they also have a global primary key and a field for a
database identifier. Each wiki is responsible for pushing data to those
global tables via hook functions whenever pages are created, edited,
watched, deleted, etc.
I have no idea what major revamping you have in mind,
when it comes to
data sharing.
Do note that we don't have any data consistency framework for
cross-database publishing, so you will always end up with
inconsistencies around, that are not guarded by transactions. For each
feature that means building a conflict/consistency management.. :)
There seem to be three major paths. (1) Let each wiki query all the others
when it needs interwiki data such as recent changes, (2) share tables, or
(3) share global tables. I think option #1 leads to constantly needing to
use foreach statements to go through all the wikis, or else doing massive
JOINs. I'm not sure what the pros and cons of option #1 are, as far as
efficiency is concerned. Option #2 works OK for stuff like the user table,
put people have told me that it's hopeless trying to share tables like the
page table. My original idea had been to add a global primary key and a
database identifier to the page table and then share it, but when the idea
was roundly panned, I ended up instead going with option #3 by sharing a new
global integration_page table that looks basically like what the shared page
table would have looked like. The only difference is, it's changed through
hook functions rather than though functions in Article.php.
-Tisane