Maybe a dumb question – I get a profound impression that this email *and* the guidelines are directed at Wikimedia employees, not MediaWiki extension developers in general. ...why? I thought that most extensions out there are not managed by Wikimedia, right?

In the latter case – are Wikimedia employees the right group to be guiding the discussion around these guidelines?

On 1/27/22 05:43, Krinkle wrote: > TLDR: Tech leads please review Best practices for extensions <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_extensions> on mediawiki.org. > > Hi all, > > You may be familiar with the Best practices for extensions <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_extensions> page on mediawiki.org. It has been marked as a draft since 2017. > > I'd like to polish this page and get it to a state where it would be uncontroversial to label it as "Development guideline <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Development_guidelines>". This would not make it a hard policy. Neither does it imply that it covers all practices in all situations. > > Rather, it would mean that the items that are there now are indeed a part of our current best practices. We would keep it alive through bold <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold> edits and talk page conversations, similar to our Coding conventions <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Coding_conventions/PHP> and other such guidelines that we maintain peer to peer and through consensus. > > The reason I've not simply labelled it as such already is because before today I found the document to be out of sync with our actual practices. I have made a number of changes with descriptive edit summaries to bring it in sync with what I percieve to be our best practices; based on how myself and other maintainers perform code review at large, and how we review new extensions prior to deployment. > > All are welcome to fix mistakes, raise questions/concerns on the talk page, on this thread. You're also welcome to message me directly anytime if you prefer. > > If you consider yourself familiar with our practices and/or lead and mentor other engineers, please take a minute to review the page and consider whether the items reflect your current understanding and judgement. > > -- > Timo Tijhof, > Principal Engineer, > Wikimedia Performance Team.

Hey! I actively contributed to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_extensions in the past. I reviewed the most recent changes for my WMDE TechWish team and can say that I'm pretty happy with how the page turned out. Some minor suggestions, though: * MUST: extension.json must name the code's <code>"license-name":</code> according tohttps://spdx.org/licenses/. * MUST: The <code>"config":</code> section in extension.json must list all configuration options with their default <code>"value":</code> and a brief <code>"description":</code>. Yes, I would seriously make this a must, knowing that most extensions currently miss the documentation part. * Is it worth asking to remove the <code>"version":</code> from extension.json when it's not actively used (any more) in the release process of an extension? * What about CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md? Isn't this required by now? * I care a lot about "readable code", but the current sentence is not very meaningful. I mean, who writes code that is intentionally _unreadable_? Maybe we can suggest making code _expressive_, so it's easy to understand for later developers, as well as follow the SOLID principles? * What does "standard internationalization systems in MediaWiki" refer to? The message system is already mentioned above. If there are more systems we should list them. * I suggest to add "or use HtmlArmor" to the sentence about wikitext vs. HTML. * The sentence "Use global MediaWiki configuration such as read-only mode" leaves me a little puzzled. What is this about? The read-only mode seems super specific – I never used it for anything. Are there better examples? * One place mentions "or stuff". Not sure which "stuff" is meant. It's probably better to remove the word. There is also some discussion about "what if I don't (want to) comply?" athttps://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Wovr2kqb7qwhztwu. While these are interesting questions, personally I don't think they should block us from moving forward. I mean, these best practices exist whether or not all existing code conforms to them, whether or not they are documented, and whether or not we call the documentation a "draft". This is just about having them documented. It's not like we plan to rename the page to "Requirements for extensions". Still it might be worth adding a sentence like "this is only for extensions listed on mediawiki.org". Best Thiemo _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list --wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email towikitech-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/