On Wed, 13 Mar 2013 11:40:08 -0700, <vitalif(a)yourcmc.ru> wrote: fixing bug 32621 is a todo. The first attempt failed and some tweaks are needed to use the PathRouter to fix that bug. PathRouter allows for the use of custom paths to expand. NamespacePaths is an example of one thing you can do (say giving Help: pages a /help/ path) but you could also apply that to special pages, etc... whatever. It's also the precursor to MW being able to handle 404s natively. The plan is in the future you'll just be able to throw everything that's not a file right at index.php and pretty urls, 404 pages, 404 thumbnail handlers, etc... will all just work natively without any special configuration. And by 404, I don't mean standard 404 pages like this: http://wiki.commonjs.org/404 I mean nice in-site 404 pages that actually help visitors find what they were looking for: http://www.dragonballencyclopedia.com/404 Not sure how PATH_INFO being unmangled fixes anything. There are other servers where PATH_INFO won't easily be outputted. REQUEST_URI handling works better in every case. And ?title=$1 in rewrite rules are evil. Determining what urls run what code has always been the job of the application in every good language, not the webserver. And we can do it using REQUEST_URI much more reliably than some webservers. Anyways, I wish I could just get rid of the PATH_INFO code. I have yet to hear of someone actually using it now that practically every webserver there is outputs REQUEST_URI meaning the PATH_INFO code is never reached. -- ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://danielfriesen.name/]

On Thu, 14 Mar 2013 23:37:40 -0700, <vitalif(a)yourcmc.ru> wrote: $wgActionPaths only support actions. And actions are a very old, legacy, and frankly dying out thing. Practically every feature is now done with special pages which were previously not eligible for special url handling. You may not think /help/Foo is nicer than /wiki/Help:Foo but there is undoubtedly some wiki that would like to have something like /user/Foo, /forum/..., or say /product/Foo. PathRouter also supports things more complex than something simple like what that one extension does. The ShortUrl extension actually even uses PathRouter to support /s/xyz style short urls to pages on the wiki (very useful on foreign wikis where urls usually look something like "/wiki/%E3%82%A6%E3%82%A3%E3%82%AD%E3%83%9A%E3%83%87%E3%82%A3%E3%82%A2"). A good deal of it is about having the control to implement whatever fits the situation you are in best. index.php/$1 is a bad way to do rewrites. It is only fully supported by Apache+mod_php. It doesn't work on other webservers. And it also breaks in some of the cgi/fcgi Apache setups. While on the other hand piping everything to index.php and using REQUEST_URI to determine what to do works on every webserver, in every setup (ok if your host didn't let you any where near any sort of config, 404, or rewrite control it wouldn't work, but neither would /wiki/$1). It also gives us better control over the url handling and makes the possibility of configuring short/pretty urls by GUI/installer in the future much more feasible. I never said that PATH_INFO was unavailable. I said it's unused. At this stage I have yet to see a webserver that does not output REQUEST_URI. Our code is written such that PATH_INFO is only used when REQUEST_URI is not given. That means that for all of those webservers the branch of code we have handling PATH_INFO is never actually run. We could probably throw a fatal error into that section of code and have absolutely no one notice. Heck, that code could legitimately bit rot, be broken for years, and it never be realized. Hence I'd like to make it disappear. -- ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://danielfriesen.name/]