I've been busy, but I can do another review of the ContentHandler branch this week.

There's the question of what level of quality we should aim for. We'll probably find things that will break when a non-text content type is used. I'd like to see such issues solved, or at least make sure the ContentHandler API will support a solution without major changes, but my reasons are mostly aesthetic. In principle, such development work can be done after the merge. But it seems to me that there's no point in merging it if it only supports text content, since MediaWiki already supports pure text content well enough. If we can achieve robust support for non-text data types, then the motivation for merging it will be stronger.

Just an idea, but wouldn't Lua source code make a perfect alternative content type? 2012/9/7 Daniel Kinzler <daniel(a)brightbyte.de>de>: > Hi Tim! > > For some reason, your mail went under my radar until now. Sorry about > that. > > On 03.09.2012 03:30, Tim Starling wrote: >> I've been busy, but I can do another review of the ContentHandler >> branch this week. > > That would be great, thanks! > >> There's the question of what level of quality we should aim for. We'll >> probably find things that will break when a non-text content type is >> used. I'd like to see such issues solved, or at least make sure the >> ContentHandler API will support a solution without major changes, but >> my reasons are mostly aesthetic. In principle, such development work >> can be done after the merge. But it seems to me that there's no point >> in merging it if it only supports text content, since MediaWiki >> already supports pure text content well enough. If we can achieve >> robust support for non-text data types, then the motivation for >> merging it will be stronger. > > I agree. We are using the mechanism extensively for Wikidata, which of > course > uses non-text content. That should serve as a pretty good test. I'm > trying to > fix any issues I find on the road, but of course we are not exploring > every > possible corner of MediaWiki. > > I think we should make sure that the main functionality of MediaWiki > works with > the ContentHandler without a hitch, and try to have sane failure modes > for stuff > that is not yet (dis)covered. There's no way to be 100% sure, of course. > > This week, I have only done a little maintenance on the Wikidata branch > (like > merging master again). I'll be looking for loose ends some more over > the next > couple of days, but any changes should be confined to small corners of > mediawiki. I'm using gerrit for all changes now, so you should be able > track > what i'm doing (well, last week I had to resort to a direct push when > gerrit got > very confused about a merge). > > Thanks again > Daniel

content type?