I very much lie the idea of this extension: it's very useful to know
what changes have been made in a software one is using. Does it only
work with WMF's gerrit? Many extensions are not hosted there. I think
that for them you can just compare the version number of the extension
with its current version number on
.
-----
Yury Katkov, WikiVote
On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 8:26 AM, Moriel Schottlender <moriel(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hello everyone,
I'd like to get your opinions and critique on my very first MediaWiki
extension, which, I hope, will be helpful to other developers.
I noticed that there's no easy way of seeing if extensions that we have
installed on our MediaWiki require update, and there are even some
extensions that get so little regular attention that when they do get
updated, there's no real way of knowing it (unless we check specifically).
It can be annoying when encountering problems or bugs, and then discovering
that one of our extensions (probably the one we least expected) actually
has an update that fixed this bug.
So, I thought to try and solve this issue with my extension. Since
MediaWiki's changes are submitted through gerrit, I thought I'd take
advantage of that and perform a remote check to see if there are any new
commits that appeared in any of the extensions since they were installed.
How it works, briefly: the system compares the local repository date to the
list of latest commits on gerrit's repo for the extension to see how many
commits a user is behind on. If the user doesn't have a local git for the
extension (or if they downloaded the extension manually) the system falls
back to testing the local modification date for the files. It's not
perfect, but it can give people a general idea of whether or not their
extensions need some TLC.
The extension is available on GitHub:
https://github.com/mooeypoo/MediaWiki-ExtensionStatus along with
screenshots and a short possible todo list.
There's a list of things I plan to try and improve, some of them are meant
to make the lives of newbie developers (like me!) easier, but I'd love it
if I could get feedback from you all and see if you think this could be
helpful to you.
Would you like to see anything else in it? Do you think I'm in the right
direction or am I doing it all wrong?
Be merciless!
Okay, maybe not *completely* merciless, but please don't hold back. This is
my very first extension, and beyond wanting to make this a good extension,
I also want to get a sense of whether or not I got into MW development
right, and if there is anything I should have done (or be doing)
differently.
Please let me know what you think!
Moriel
(mooeypoo)
--
No trees were harmed in the creation of this post.
But billions of electrons, photons, and electromagnetic waves were terribly
inconvenienced during its transmission!
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