Sabine Cretella wrote:
Software
As much as I could understand Erik is doing a real good job on this
and thank God the piece of software is being developed with an
outside contract – otherwise I suppose we would have even more
difficulties when talking about this. So the software will be there
in any case, free for anyone to use and improve.
We've been hearing for many months that there's software coming just
around the corner. Where is it?
Our development software is in a publically viewable CVS repository,
where it can be reviewed, others can help out or try it, and it won't be
lost forever if the original author stops working on it or suffers a
disk crash without backups.
I'll grant that not everything we'd all love to see has been coded yet;
some planned projects have barely been started or remain pure vaporware.
But code that exists for MediaWiki and its supporting programs is
visible to the development team and the public.
When I spoke to Erik in Frankfurt he told us he would be committing some
experimental code in the coming weeks for a namespace manager. This
apparently is to be used by Wikidata when it exists.
Is there anything else currently coded or ready to code?
I want to be clear that I don't mean to put Erik down or claim he's not
doing anything; he's made some really useful contributions to our
software over the years and I'm sure he is churning out some great stuff
now.
But there is a lot of confusion over the state of this project, which
feeds into the confusion about how imminent UW is and whether it's
something people should be thinking about and how. I think it would help
if the community (and the developers, and the foundation) had a better
idea of where we stand.
Sabine and Gerard: do you guys have a clear idea of what the status is?
Erik: can you help clarify?
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)