On 03/31/2014 06:14 PM, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:

On 02/26/2014 12:23 PM, Daniel Kinzler wrote:

...

I have just pushed a new version of the TitleValue patch to Gerrit: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/106517.

I have also updated the RDF to reflect the latest changes: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/TitleValue.

Please have a look. I have tried to address several issues with the previous proposal, and reduce the complexity of the proposal. I have also tried to adjust the service interfaces to make migration easier.

Any feedback would be very welcome!

-- daniel

Update: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/106517/ has now been merged. To quote the commit message:

...

The intention is to improve testability and reusability; these advantages will however only become apparent with further refactoring of the respective special pages. This will be done in follow-up changes.

More work will be needed to migrate essential functionality from Title and Linker classes into the respective service classes, MediaWikiTitleCodec and MediaWikiPageLinkRenderer.

I asked Daniel what we need to do next on TitleValue and he said:

Sorry for not getting back to you on this sooner. It's a bit tricky to say what the next steps would be. There is several directions we could take this. But none of them fit naturally with my Wikidata work, so I can only try to squeeze in bits and pieces every now and then. Would be great to get more people in on this.

Anyway, here is what could be done:

1. Using TitleValue in more places. There's a refactoring of CategoryLinks [1]

that I still need to update and rebase, and more special pages and API modules could follow this approach. This would improve testability, in particular.

2. Contimue wrapping up lose ends left by the TitleValue refactor. The code for

splitting a title into its components needs to be refactored and tidied, in particular. This also means writing lots of tests for the current behavior of Title, so we don't change it.

3. factor more things out of the Title class. TitleValue is just the start. We

could factor out the logic for permission checks into a separate "service"; Also, we could start defining value objects for different kinds of links (internal, interwiki, external, etc) on top of/in addition to TitleValue. Note that the conflation of "title" and "link target" is the cause of quite a bit of confustion.

4. Refactor other "nasty" parts of MediaWiki. Some prime candidates are Linker,

User, and WikiPage. Actually, ContentHandler could also use an overhaul: Content should be a plain value interface, all "smart" aspects should be factored into services.

So much to code, so little time :)

This kind of lots-of-little-refactorings work feels like a good candidate for a sprint at the Zurich hackathon, where people who don't know this codebase very well can help out. Daniel, do you agree?