On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 6:52 PM, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
There are a few issues with how our file/image handling works that make handling remote files a bit harder than it needs to be.
Some things don't work consistently over InstantCommons because a local MediaHandler class is used that doesn't understand the remote data, and the whole FileRepo architecture is pretty awkward for actually storing "local" files outside of the filesystem (eg the Extension:SwiftMedia backend has to jump through a lot of hoops).
I've started collecting some notes for an RFC on the wiki:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Refactor_on_File-FileRep...
Yay! I've watchlisted the page and will certainly provide some feedback once I've read thru the whole thing.
There's not a lot of specific work targets in there yet, as we'll want some more data from the folks working on the alternate backends as well as the frontend issues which are mostly what I've written on.
One thing at the very least stands out to me (and has been mentioned in discussions elsewhere)...we *really* need to have a FileStore-esque class that abstracts file system operations. Lots of SwiftMedia duplication could be avoided if all it had to implement was the filesystem logic. By extension, we could possibly end up supporting the "put uploads in the database" enhancement[0].
-Chad