Dear developers,
in the framework of developping a reliable E-Mailnotification scheme
(see
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/EmailNotification ) I also changed
the equal handling of watching (watch list) pages and their
corresponding talk pages. This feature is nice and I like it, but the
implementation by using bit-masking to cover namespace and namespace+1
made me crazy while implementing a clean E-Mailnotification (E-Notif)
scheme.
Let me shortly explain the reasons.The E-Notif needs to store a
timestamp (when a notification was sent to user X watching page P) in
the database. But as I need to keep track which of these pages the user
X has re-visited - in order to clear the notification flag (timestamp) -
a separate entry for *each* page (page, page_talk) was necessary. The
about four changes were extremely simple.
The E-Mail notification patch will be published soon; the documentation
is constantly updated on the above mentioned page.
User_talk pages get still their very special treatment, but I am going
to propose to treat User_talk pages in the same way as other
watch-listed pages. This would make the code cleaner.
Tom aka Nyxos
Berlin