Hey everyone,
Reading around MW and looking into some ideas for GSoC I ran into this bug, https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14950, which I noticed (correct me if i'm wrong) isn't currently being worked on, and as Roan Kattouw said on one of the last comments, hasn't ever been written yet (i know it's kind of old, but anyway).
I wanted to get some feedback on the next couple of things:
1 - Is this a feature that could actually be needed/helpful/useful? 2 - Is it true that it's currently not being worked on? 3 - Would it be too big of a project for a single person to take on? (given the amount of time to actually implement it for GSoC)
Thanks for your time.
Jere.
2012/2/15 Jeremias Nunez jeremias.np@gmail.com
1 - Is this a feature that could actually be needed/helpful/useful?
Would be the most useful thing since sliced bread! I miss it very much. Go on! :-)
On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 4:29 AM, Jeremias Nunez jeremias.np@gmail.comwrote:
Hey everyone,
Reading around MW and looking into some ideas for GSoC I ran into this bug, https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14950, which I noticed (correct me if i'm wrong) isn't currently being worked on, and as Roan Kattouw said on one of the last comments, hasn't ever been written yet (i know it's kind of old, but anyway).
I wanted to get some feedback on the next couple of things:
1 - Is this a feature that could actually be needed/helpful/useful? 2 - Is it true that it's currently not being worked on? 3 - Would it be too big of a project for a single person to take on? (given the amount of time to actually implement it for GSoC)
We discussed this on IRC. A quick recap:
I tried to implement this when I completely refactored the preferences system in 2009. It was eventually reverted in r49932http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/49932. The main blocker was basically considering a way to decide *which* preferences would have their values synchronised. A UI would need to be developed for that and you'd need some extensive consultation on that fact.
If you were to implement this, you could potentially use my original implementation as a guide, though it is reasonably "in the guts" of MediaWiki so you'd have to be reasonably confident "code diving" into unfamiliar software packages.
I'll defer to Sumana on whether or not the project is of an appropriate size for GSoC.
—Andrew
When you say "extensive consultation" are you referring to the UI or to which preferences could be made global? I think we talked about this on IRC too but I don't quite remember.
I'd also appreciate if you could point me where I could start "diving in", so I can get a sense of how things were done.
Thanks again.
2012/2/15 Andrew Garrett agarrett@wikimedia.org
On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 4:29 AM, Jeremias Nunez <jeremias.np@gmail.com
wrote:
Hey everyone,
Reading around MW and looking into some ideas for GSoC I ran into this bug, https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14950, which I noticed (correct me if i'm wrong) isn't currently being worked on, and as Roan Kattouw said on one of the last comments, hasn't ever been written
yet
(i know it's kind of old, but anyway).
I wanted to get some feedback on the next couple of things:
1 - Is this a feature that could actually be needed/helpful/useful? 2 - Is it true that it's currently not being worked on? 3 - Would it be too big of a project for a single person to take on? (given the amount of time to actually implement it for GSoC)
We discussed this on IRC. A quick recap:
I tried to implement this when I completely refactored the preferences system in 2009. It was eventually reverted in r49932http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/49932. The main blocker was basically considering a way to decide *which* preferences would have their values synchronised. A UI would need to be developed for that and you'd need some extensive consultation on that fact.
If you were to implement this, you could potentially use my original implementation as a guide, though it is reasonably "in the guts" of MediaWiki so you'd have to be reasonably confident "code diving" into unfamiliar software packages.
I'll defer to Sumana on whether or not the project is of an appropriate size for GSoC.
—Andrew
-- Andrew Garrett Wikimedia Foundation agarrett@wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On 16/02/12 14:11, Jeremias Nuñez wrote:
When you say "extensive consultation" are you referring to the UI or to which preferences could be made global? I think we talked about this on IRC too but I don't quite remember.
I'd also appreciate if you could point me where I could start "diving in", so I can get a sense of how things were done.
Thanks again.
The problem is the social part. For instance, some people will want their skin to be global, while others will moan because they "need" a different one between two wikis.
It should be much easier with the "new" (3 yo) preferences system. Conceptually, I think the changes needed to support it are easy: instead of using the user preference or the wiki default if not available you would use the user preference, then the user global preference, and finally the wiki default.
The challenge will be at providing a suitable interface for preferences, setting explicit preferences (currently we just remove the user preference if the user chooses the default), switching between global and local preferences (I'd make the page for the global ones the default), etc.
Thanks for all your replies!
Taking in to account what you all have said, and after re-viewing past years projects like Sumana said I realized that maybe what was stopping me from having a clear understanding of the idea and how to sort it out was actually it's too wide scope.
Looking at other years project's made think about how important it is to well-define your project's reach and how it will interact with other components. On the other hand is also what Platonides says about everyone wanting to have "this" or "that" option able to be set globally across wikis, which is a never-ending discusion.
So I guess I'll be looking into something else for the time being. Thanks a million for the great feedback.
Jeremias.
2012/2/16 Platonides Platonides@gmail.com
On 16/02/12 14:11, Jeremias Nuñez wrote:
When you say "extensive consultation" are you referring to the UI or to which preferences could be made global? I think we talked about this on
IRC
too but I don't quite remember.
I'd also appreciate if you could point me where I could start "diving
in",
so I can get a sense of how things were done.
Thanks again.
The problem is the social part. For instance, some people will want their skin to be global, while others will moan because they "need" a different one between two wikis.
It should be much easier with the "new" (3 yo) preferences system. Conceptually, I think the changes needed to support it are easy: instead of using the user preference or the wiki default if not available you would use the user preference, then the user global preference, and finally the wiki default.
The challenge will be at providing a suitable interface for preferences, setting explicit preferences (currently we just remove the user preference if the user chooses the default), switching between global and local preferences (I'd make the page for the global ones the default), etc.
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On 02/15/2012 04:39 PM, Andrew Garrett wrote:
On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 4:29 AM, Jeremias Nunez jeremias.np@gmail.comwrote:
Hey everyone,
Reading around MW and looking into some ideas for GSoC I ran into this bug, https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14950, which I noticed (correct me if i'm wrong) isn't currently being worked on, and as Roan Kattouw said on one of the last comments, hasn't ever been written yet (i know it's kind of old, but anyway).
I wanted to get some feedback on the next couple of things:
1 - Is this a feature that could actually be needed/helpful/useful? 2 - Is it true that it's currently not being worked on? 3 - Would it be too big of a project for a single person to take on? (given the amount of time to actually implement it for GSoC)
We discussed this on IRC. A quick recap:
I tried to implement this when I completely refactored the preferences system in 2009. It was eventually reverted in r49932http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/49932. The main blocker was basically considering a way to decide *which* preferences would have their values synchronised. A UI would need to be developed for that and you'd need some extensive consultation on that fact.
If you were to implement this, you could potentially use my original implementation as a guide, though it is reasonably "in the guts" of MediaWiki so you'd have to be reasonably confident "code diving" into unfamiliar software packages.
I'll defer to Sumana on whether or not the project is of an appropriate size for GSoC.
—Andrew
Jeremias:
First, some general advice: look at previous people's experiences. Past projects:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_Past_Projects
And, just as a reminder: You're trying to budget three months of working about 40 hours per week, plus some ramping-up time in the spring and whatever you can fit around your other commitments between now and late April. The timeline:
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/events/google/gsoc2012
Now, specifically about Global User Preferences. From what Andrew has said about this, it's a task that would just be a few hundred lines of code, perhaps two weeks' worth of work, for a skilled MediaWiki developer with years of experience, comprehensive designs and specifications. I imagine that if you either had the UI specification OR years of experience, but not both, the work would take somewhat longer. But you don't have either, so maybe you should spend a few days investigating the issue to figure out how big and unwieldy it is, on a code level and on an interaction design level. Then you can think about what the majority of the work would be, and perhaps consider whether you want to do THIS as a project, or whether it gives you an idea for a related project that is less unwieldy.
I asked Andrew for examples of past MediaWiki GSoC projects that were well-scoped, and he suggested Visual Diff, Image Rendering Daemon, and the SocialProfile work. So you could look at those.
Looking forward to continuing our conversation as you learn more and think about what a well-scoped project would be.
You wrote:
When you say "extensive consultation" are you referring to the UI or to which preferences could be made global? I think we talked about this on IRC too but I don't quite remember.
It will be worth your time to install and learn a real IRC client, such as xchat, that saves IRC logs. You can also read IRC channel logs at http://toolserver.org/~mwbot/ for #mediawiki and http://prototype.wikimedia.org/logs/%23wikimedia-dev/ for #wikimedia-dev.
I am planning to participate in GSoC, and was looking for a project. Global preferences also came to my mind, and now I see this thread. So if Jeremias doesn't take this project, I will consider doing it.
2012/2/16 Sumana Harihareswara sumanah@wikimedia.org:
On 02/15/2012 04:39 PM, Andrew Garrett wrote:
On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 4:29 AM, Jeremias Nunez jeremias.np@gmail.comwrote:
Hey everyone,
Reading around MW and looking into some ideas for GSoC I ran into this bug, https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14950, which I noticed (correct me if i'm wrong) isn't currently being worked on, and as Roan Kattouw said on one of the last comments, hasn't ever been written yet (i know it's kind of old, but anyway).
I wanted to get some feedback on the next couple of things:
1 - Is this a feature that could actually be needed/helpful/useful? 2 - Is it true that it's currently not being worked on? 3 - Would it be too big of a project for a single person to take on? (given the amount of time to actually implement it for GSoC)
We discussed this on IRC. A quick recap:
I tried to implement this when I completely refactored the preferences system in 2009. It was eventually reverted in r49932http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/49932. The main blocker was basically considering a way to decide *which* preferences would have their values synchronised. A UI would need to be developed for that and you'd need some extensive consultation on that fact.
If you were to implement this, you could potentially use my original implementation as a guide, though it is reasonably "in the guts" of MediaWiki so you'd have to be reasonably confident "code diving" into unfamiliar software packages.
I'll defer to Sumana on whether or not the project is of an appropriate size for GSoC.
—Andrew
Jeremias:
First, some general advice: look at previous people's experiences. Past projects:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_Past_Projects
And, just as a reminder: You're trying to budget three months of working about 40 hours per week, plus some ramping-up time in the spring and whatever you can fit around your other commitments between now and late April. The timeline:
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/events/google/gsoc2012
Now, specifically about Global User Preferences. From what Andrew has said about this, it's a task that would just be a few hundred lines of code, perhaps two weeks' worth of work, for a skilled MediaWiki developer with years of experience, comprehensive designs and specifications. I imagine that if you either had the UI specification OR years of experience, but not both, the work would take somewhat longer. But you don't have either, so maybe you should spend a few days investigating the issue to figure out how big and unwieldy it is, on a code level and on an interaction design level. Then you can think about what the majority of the work would be, and perhaps consider whether you want to do THIS as a project, or whether it gives you an idea for a related project that is less unwieldy.
I asked Andrew for examples of past MediaWiki GSoC projects that were well-scoped, and he suggested Visual Diff, Image Rendering Daemon, and the SocialProfile work. So you could look at those.
Looking forward to continuing our conversation as you learn more and think about what a well-scoped project would be.
You wrote:
When you say "extensive consultation" are you referring to the UI or to which preferences could be made global? I think we talked about this on IRC too but I don't quite remember.
It will be worth your time to install and learn a real IRC client, such as xchat, that saves IRC logs. You can also read IRC channel logs at http://toolserver.org/~mwbot/ for #mediawiki and http://prototype.wikimedia.org/logs/%23wikimedia-dev/ for #wikimedia-dev.
-- Sumana Harihareswara Volunteer Development Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Jeremias Nunez jeremias.np@gmail.com writes:
1 - Is this a feature that could actually be needed/helpful/useful?
I often have to copy my sig to a new wiki whenever I sign into it to make a comment. My email is copied to every wiki automatically, why not my signature?
I would LOVE to have this implemented.
2 - Is it true that it's currently not being worked on?
I don't know of anyone working on this.
3 - Would it be too big of a project for a single person to take on? (given the amount of time to actually implement it for GSoC)
If nothing else, I'd like signatures copied. That should be simple enough, but I don't know enough about how the emails are copied. It seems like this could at least be a start to create a method of copying preferences if not doing the whole thing.
On 16/02/12 17:44, Mark A. Hershberger wrote:
3 - Would it be too big of a project for a single person to take on? (given the amount of time to actually implement it for GSoC)
If nothing else, I'd like signatures copied. That should be simple enough, but I don't know enough about how the emails are copied. It seems like this could at least be a start to create a method of copying preferences if not doing the whole thing.
The email belongs to the SUL account. In fact, it's not a preference, as it lives in user table for normal installs.
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org