Jesús Quiroga wrote:
The polyglot wiki promises to learn several languages and to speak them correctly forever, so, if a new database comes along or any of their data languages evolves, the polyglot wiki is forced to adapt at a potentially great cost. Besides, any change to the database schema can trigger lots of updates to the wiki code, and be very costly too.
Would it be possible to put an end to this thread with a simple veto?
No, forget it, anyone caught committing such code will be shot on sight. The issue at hand is installation, the rest of the codebase works just fine with multiple DBMSs. Any remaining issues in the bulk codebase can be fixed using the established abstractions in the Database class.
I'd let it run, but I'm afraid this sort of talk might either scare off new developers (such as the OP), or fool them into wasting their time rewriting 100k lines of code in the mistaken belief that the proposal is somehow desirable.
MediaWiki's installer is dysfunctional, and various parts of the user interface are practically unusuable except by seasoned hackers who eat ground-up silicon chips for breakfast. Extension message loading is slow enough to be prohibitive for installations without APC, and uses massive amounts of memory. Let's get our priorities straight and avoid fixing the things that aren't broken.
-- Tim Starling