Hello community,
tl;dr:
I'd love to see if there's anyone in the community that can help me take charge of ExtensionStatus development, or take it over completely.
Longer version:
About 9 months ago, just before I started Google Summer of Code 2013, I developed "ExtensionStatus", which checks the current status of all extensions that are installed in the given wiki and compares them with either their git branch info (if git is available) or scrapes data from the gerrit website. It gives sysadmins an at-a-glance dashboard so they can see what needs upgrading.
There was a bit of interest, so I went on and started some testing, which seemed to go well for a while.
But then I started GSoC and the project I worked on kept me quite busy. After the summer I went back to full-time grad school and a part-time job, both of which took me away from working on developing the extension any further than its extremely experimental state.
In the last couple of days I started seeing a renewed interest in the extension, and I think it could be worth a second visit. I'd love to continue working on it, but with grad school and work, my time is really limited and I don't think I can take it on alone.
Considering all of that, I thought I'd officially "unlick the cookie" and see if there is interest from the community to take it on either fully or partially.
Here's the github repo: https://github.com/mooeypoo/MediaWiki-ExtensionStatus
And here's the extension page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ExtensionStatus
There's also an empty gerrit repo that is awaiting setup: https://git.wikimedia.org/summary/mediawiki%2Fextensions%2FExtensionStatus (I didn't really have much experience with gerrit back then to set it up properly - and now I am not sure I'd have the time to develop, review, and approve code on my own.)
So, does anyone want to join in and help revisit the code?
Cheers,
Moriel (aka mooeypoo)
Hey,
Checking such extension status is essentially solved by dependency management. And dependency management is solved by various tools, the one being relevant to MediaWiki and other PHP projects being Composer [0]. In fact this capability already exists for several extensions, though there is no nice GUI for it yet. An example of such version checking can be seen at [1] which checks if the versions required for a component are up to date with the ones it provides. In that case the thing being checked for out of date dependencies in a component itself, though the exact same code can work for a wiki. Some relevant pages on the existing support are [2, 3, 4].
Implementing the ideas I outlined in [4] is not terribly difficult and will result in very powerful capabilities. Or rather, it will make them a lot more visible and accessible, which will then likely result in wider adoption of the underlying paradigm (dependency management) amongst extension authors. I estimate that building a working prototype can take as little as two days, as indeed most of the groundwork has already been done [5].
That is in contrast to scraping things of gerrit, or relying on info on MediaWiki.org being comprehensive and up to date, combined with building an own solution. I anticipate such a solution to be way less powerful, much harder to maintain, being rather brittle, not being interoperable at all, and harder to create in the first place.
[0] http://getcomposer.org/ [1] https://www.versioneye.com/php/mediawiki:semantic-mediawiki [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Composer [3] http://www.bn2vs.com/blog/2014/02/15/introduction-to-composer-for-mediawiki-... [4] http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=31680734 [5] If you think I'm full of shit, throw me 2k USD and I will prove you wrong
Cheers
-- Jeroen De Dauw http://www.bn2vs.com Don't panic. Don't be evil. ~=[,,_,,]:3 --
Am 23.02.2014 02:22, schrieb Moriel:
https://github.com/mooeypoo/MediaWiki-ExtensionStatus
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ExtensionStatus ... So, does anyone want to join in and help revisit the code?
It appears to me that you need at least bring your extension in line with the present MediaWiki core code. The core code recently improved the information display on the Special:Version pages - did you notice ?
Bringing extension code inline with core code /can /be painful (your mileage may vary), but once you did this, an investment, you can quickly update and follow further changes. Let me know, if you are ready.
On Feb 24, 2014 3:13 AM, "Thomas Gries" mail@tgries.de wrote:
Am 23.02.2014 02:22, schrieb Moriel:
https://github.com/mooeypoo/MediaWiki-ExtensionStatus
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ExtensionStatus ...
So, does anyone want to join in and help revisit the code?
It appears to me that you need at least bring your extension in line with
the present MediaWiki core code.
The core code recently improved the information display on the
Special:Version pages - did you notice ?
Bringing extension code inline with core code /can /be painful (your
mileage may vary), but once you did this, an investment, you can quickly update and follow further changes. Let me know, if you are ready.
In the original email she said that due to lack of time/life/etc the extension hasn't been touched in 9 months and for renewed development essentially needs a new co-maintainer. Given that, its hardly surprising that the extension doesn't take into account new features from the last couple months.
-bawolff
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org