As a new MediaWiki developer (8 merged commits right now, https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/dashboard/417) and an experienced template and Gadget developer on pl.wikipedia (https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedysta:Matma_Rex):
2012/9/3 Oren Bochman orenbochman@gmail.com:
- The community is an a massive untapped resource for development. (They
like to edit wikis, upload photos and also to code....)
Totally this. Don't also forget about non-English wikis; there are many JavaScript programmers and tools developers who for various reasons do not look into MediaWiki itself. (I used to be one until recently.)
- I would seriouly look at maximizing its potential before allocating more
funds for paid devlopment. 2.1 This means making it much easier to develop/test/deploy to Live wikis. (Short Tutorials, Code Samples, Documentation) 2.2 Create a culture where new coders are assigned to work with experinced coders to fix and maintaining existing code. 2.4 Team up with Wikia and WikiHow Devteams on common features and on small wiki testing.
All this could be great, but for me the worst "obstacle" is the glacial pace of gerrit review. As a template/gadget developer I'm used to a quick cycle: code, preview (a template) or test in debugger (gadget), look at it for five more minutes to maybe catch some stupid mistakes, and press Save (of course, I also used dev versions of scripts or templates' sandboxes for non-trivial changes).
With gerrit, I code, check, check on my testwiki, git review (and by god, is that tool a total kludge!), and then I wait for days for someone to look at my changes, or head to #mediawiki and beg for reviews (and apparently the channel is half-dead; is it supposed to be a support channel? Because sometimes I'm the only one replying to newcomers there...). It sometimes looks like all the experienced MW developers are just reviewing each other's changes.
Then someone complains (sometimes about something pointless, or something they could fix themselves in thirty seconds and submit a patchset), I code again, git review again, and wait again.
(I don't mean this all personally, to anyone.)
While I applud Sumana who does a great job with the community - thisworks needs to be followed though organicaly by all members of the development teams
Let me just say that I basically love Sumana already, for her help and encouragement. :)
Also. gerrit is absolute load of poop. The web UI kinda sucks (but we all know this already, don't we?), but my real beef is with the git-review tool. I'm semi-experienced with git, and rebases are not a scare to me; but if it keeps complaining about multiple commits to be sent when I only have a single new one, and if something as simple as creating a commit that depends on two other unmerged commits requires this much arcane magic, and if I can't post a review to go along with my patchset, and if it requires hand-applied patches (!) to work properly on Windows, then something is deeply wrong. I can only imagine what kind of torture using it must be to someone just starting out with git (or, worse, source control).
-- Matma Rex