Rowan:
Well, I believe Brion is keen to see 1.5 ready sooner
than later -
according to
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-April/028899.html
he was hoping it would be in beta a month ago, so landing a change as
fundamental as this is unlikely to be popular with him. And for the
record, I think he's right - if the unstable branch stays unstable for
too long at a time, features that are fully mature take ages to see
the light of day.
That makes sense. Depending on when I'm finished, I'll either commit to
a separate branch or ask for 1.5 itself to be branched.
That sounds like something a lot of people will like -
not so much
often-requested, as often-misunderstood-that-it-already-works. One
thing occurs to me though - can the "main" namespace have synonyms
(or, perhaps, be removed altogether)? This is important because in the
Wikibooks scenario (see also something like the Mozilla Wiki, which
uses namespaces more-or-less in this idiom), having [[foo]] always
point to something completely different to [[:foo]] may not be an
ideal way of distinguishing those two pages.
Interesting point. Redirecting pages with no prefix to a namespace might
be possible, would that have the result you want? Are there any
particular problems that would have to be dealt with in such a scenario?
Of course, as with InterWiki prefixes, the danger is
that as soon as
someone *removes* such a synonym, all links using it instantly break
(or, more confusingly, not instantly, because of caching).
Yes. One major reason to move namespaces into the DB is that we can do
proper validations before mucking about with them -- that is almost
impossible when it's all done in variables in the configuration files.
For example, it's currently completely possible to inadvertently hide
InterWiki prefixes or pseudo-namespaces by adding an extra namespace, or
to break links by changing one.
One problem that will have to be dealt with is that a change of the
language code will require new namespace names to be used. A "Load from
language file" link on Special:Namespaces might be a reasonable
temporary solution, but in the long run, it would probably be desirable
to move site-wide preferences like this into the DB as well, so we can
validate changes and trigger certain effects. I recall there was some
work on this a while ago, hopefully it can be revived at some point.
Best,
Erik