On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 2:07 PM, Jack Phoenix jack@countervandalism.net wrote: ....
What's common to third-party users of MediaWiki is not just custom extensions, but sadly core changes, or as they're better known, core hacks -- unsupported changes to the core of the MediaWiki software. I think that everyone will agree with me when I say that we will want to reduce the amount of core hacking by third-parties and instead increase collaboration with us, the upstream developers of MediaWiki.
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Essentially I'd like to see all major third-party users contributing code to the upstream version of MediaWiki and everyone keeping their copies of MediaWiki on the official MediaWiki Subversion repository at svn.wikimedia.org....
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Jack Phoenix MediaWiki developer
I've been reading this discussion with interest and thought a few updates/links might be useful:
Sam Reed has put together a list of the Wikia diffs that need to be upstreamed[0], and Sean Colombo's working on it.
Markus Glaser is coming to the upcoming New Orleans hackathon[1] and will chat about third party development upstream to MediaWiki SVN, among other issues.
Olivier Finlay Beaton put together a survey of what versions of MediaWiki are being run out in the wild[2] and found that the majority are on 1.16.x. Some administrators stay on old versions because they have extension compatibility issues, or because they don't know or don't care that new versions are available. We should address those obstacles in other ways. But to the extent that administrators don't upgrade because of their core hacks -- that's the friction that Sean, Jack, Reuben, Joachim, and Markus can especially help us reduce.
From outside our immediate community, an essay on the cost of *not*
upstreaming[3].
[0] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikia_code [1] http://mediawiki.org/wiki/NOLA_Hackathon [2] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Extension_support#What.27s_out_there [3] http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2011/09/01/the-cost-of-going-it-alone/
Sumana Harihareswara Volunteer Development Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation