On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 9:12 PM, K. Peachey <p858snake(a)yahoo.com.au> wrote:
That is apparently fixed in the newer versions, where
you can set it
up to hide the more advanced stuff on forms and stuff unless people
want to use it and have forms that can only be touched if another one
is. We do have a running testbed for the new version somewhere on the
WMF servers, its address is in one of the bug reports requesting the
upgrade.
New version of what? Bugzilla? I assume Mozilla's is roughly the
latest version. That one is definitely better than ours, but still
pretty confusing to normal people, compared to something like
Launchpad or Google Issues.
On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 11:47 PM, Mike.lifeguard
<mike.lifeguard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Launchpad is (I think) still undergoing lots of
changes. It may be
opensourced now, but I'm not sure it is ready. I actually have UI
complaints... since this request is at least in part coming from folks
on the usability team, I wonder what they think of Launchpad. Maybe I'm
hallucinating usability issues.
Well, workflow is just a lot smoother for common things. So for
instance, to subscribe, just click "Subscribe" and it works
immediately via AJAX. On Bugzilla you have to type in your e-mail
address in the CC field, or scroll all the way to the bottom and check
the box and hit Submit and hope you didn't change anything else by
mistake at the same time, and hope that no one else changed anything
at the same time so you avoid a mid-air collision. "Mark as
duplicate" is similarly simple.
And it's just organized more intuitively. Compare:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/firefox/+bug/18305
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=235115
On Bugzilla you have to scroll through more than a page of mysterious
fields (at my resolution) before you ever get to the actual bug
description. Launchpad has most things neatly tucked away at the
side. People are identified by names instead of e-mails. Status
changes are noted inline in the comment that accompanies them instead
of being hidden in a separate activity history. It's just . . . way
better.
On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 2:17 AM, Robert Rohde <rarohde(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The historical position has been that absolutely
nothing goes into the
WMF software pool unless it is open source. As I recall, the only
recognized exception was the closed source firmware running the
routers at the server farm. By that standard, even a freebie is not
good enough if the system is closed source.
Obviously this is not the current position, because the image servers
run Solaris. The position was always to use open-source software
*unless* no OSS met Wikimedia's needs. This was (is) the case for
routers. It was also the case for Java before it was open-source,
AFAIK just because Robert was more comfortable with Java Lucene than
CLucene and you have to take volunteers where you can get them.
Although the switch to Solaris wasn't discussed anywhere in public as
far as I know, my impression is that it happened after we lost a whole
bunch of images due to programming error, for the sake of being able
to use ZFS snapshots.
I'm also not sure who would enforce such a policy with Brion no longer
CTO. I note Priyanka's initial requirements just said "Free", and
^demon changed that to "Free (Beer and Speech)".
Personally, I would like to see Wikimedia stick to all OSS.
Wikimedia's goal is to advance free knowledge, and supporting free
software advances that goal, at least construed in a broad sense.
Every high-profile user to any given open-source project helps that
project and thereby OSS as a whole. But I'm not making the decisions
here.