On 20 November 2012 19:53, Faidon Liambotis <faidon(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 05:19:51PM -0800, James Forrester wrote:
In WMF Engineering, we've been struggling
with what we mean by 'supporting'
browsers, and how we can match limited developer time to our natural desire
to make everyone happy.
<snip>
So, to turn this mass of text into an 'ask', I would love the thoughts of
this list about this. Do you think this might work? Is "making sure all the
different parts of MediaWiki keep working with <browser I love>" something
you'd see yourself volunteering to do?
So, I think you're intermixing two different things: MediaWiki support
and "WMF Engineering" or "cluster" browser support.
I disagree. I switched from talking about WMF Engineering to asking
whether third parties, enthusiasts and volunteers would want to take
on wider MediaWiki support because an effect of our suggested policy
is that WMF's involvement in MediaWiki support for browsers not on
"our list" will reduce. This does not mean I think the two things are
the same; I would love MediaWiki to work perfectly with a wider range
of user agents than WMF has the resources to support.
[Snip]
For example, browsers make a huge difference in the
SSL features they
support. So, we currently don't do SNI, as it's unsupported on certain
browser/platforms¹ (mainly: Windows XP and Android < 3). Other SSL
features (e.g. RFC 5077) are in a similar state, and I guess we can
think of other such features not exclusive to MediaWiki.
Should this policy be expanded to cover such cases too? I think so. We
should definitely put more effort though and expand your use cases to
ops use cases too.
Yes, this policy would cover all of WMF Engineering; sorry for not
picking an area in Ops as one of my two examples. :-)
In this particular case, it might well be that you (or someone else in
Ops) at some point makes the call that using SNI is more important
than supporting users with Windows XP (though probably not whilst
they're 21%(!) of our users). I'd expect you to highlight this change
in support to the wider community rather than just breaking it by
switching over, but that is what the framework is for - making a
decision and justifying it. :-)
J.
--
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester(a)wikimedia.org | @jdforrester