Sounds like there are some issues here that may need
untangling. I'm
pinging Erik. He's probably aware of this but I would like to hear his POV.
Mobile is high on WMF's priority stack and it's high on my list of personal
interests.
Pine
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 1:46 PM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
What you're saying, Trevor, makes sense, and
I agree that we shouldn't
have
a "code purgatory". I won't presume to speak for Jon, but I imagine his
somewhat provocative presentation of Mantle is due, at least in part, to
frustration. About a year ago, the mobile web team was gung-ho to start
moving parts of MobileFrontend into core. The first step in this process
was to convert MobileFrontend into a skin, which we did. The second part
was to move our template system into core, since most of the other parts
depend on it and there's no MVC framework in core, especially not for
client-side use. We put together an RfC on this,[1] and pushed it at the
architecture summit. No consensus was reached on moving forward, and
instead we reluctantly agreed to hold off on doing anything until Gabriel
had a chance to implement an alternate solution for comparison. We
recently
tested Gabriel's implementation,[2] but are not totally satisfied with it
or convinced that it is the best way forward (although Gabriel is still in
the process of improving it).
After having lost most of our momentum, we recently pushed to prioritize
core infrastructure work during mobile web's planning for the upcoming
fiscal year, and even talked about breaking off part of the mobile web
team
into a "skin and infrastructure team". This too was basically shut down in
favor of continuing work on mobile features. Then after suffering both of
these setbacks we learn that there is yet another nascent proposal for a
new core UI skinning infrastructure and even though it doesn't have a
single line of code yet, you have been granted 80% of your time to work on
it (rather than working on either of other two systems that have already
been started). While it's great that you have invited the mobile web team
to participate in this effort, I hope you can understand how this entire
experience has been extremely demoralizing and frustrating for the mobile
web team. Personally, I can't blame Jon for losing patience in the process
and (purposefully or not) causing a stink about it.
That said, I hope we (the mobile web team) can put aside some of our
feelings of being snubbed and outmaneuvered and work (yet again) towards
reaching some sort of consensus on moving forward.
1.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/HTML_templating_library
2.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/HTML_templating_library…
Ryan Kaldari
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 12:05 PM, Trevor Parscal <tparscal(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
Indeed, this thread is a bit silly.
If someone wants to make an extension that provides a feature, and
someone
else wants to use it, there's nothing wrong
with that. But why would
such a
thing need proposing?
If the point of Mantle is only to provide a way to bring templates to
the
client, then sell it that way. Look at the code
in Mantle, and the way
it's
been pitched online and in person. It includes
other things too, and has
been repeatedly advertised as a general place where any code that is
experimental can be put, while also simultaneously pushing for others to
depend on it.
I have no problem with adding useful functionality to ResourceLoader,
even
doing so in an extension. I have a problem with
trying to develop, what
Jon
himself call, a code "purgatory".
I'm happy to talk in person as well.
- Trevor
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:23 AM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
> This whole thread seems a bit silly to me. We put stuff that should
be in
> core into extensions all the time (for lots
of different reasons). For
> example: WikiEditor, VisualEditor, Echo, MobileFrontend, JsonConfig,
etc.
So why is
Mantle such a bad idea? There's no consensus on implementing
templating in core yet, so it seems like a pretty cool idea to have an
extension that other extensions can utilize for that technology in the
meantime (instead of writing separate code for the same purpose). The
JsonConfig and EventLogging extensions are basically the same idea,
right?
> I think if Jon had named the extension "TemplateDooDad" (and hadn't
> emphasized the fact that he was avoiding putting the code into core),
it
> wouldn't have raised anyone's
hackles.
>
> Ryan Kaldari
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 10:57 AM, Jon Robson <jdlrobson(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> > Trevor,
> > That email you quote was about totally different code and a proposal
> > to put it into Mantle and is off topic for this discussion.\T
> > Trevor, please grab me in real life, so we can quell this
> > misunderstanding asap, I feel for whatever reason I am not
effectively
> > communicating to you and possibly
others and I would like to work
out
> > why and avoid future misunderstandings.
I had hoped to grab you
> > yesterday but I didn't get time because of the Flow release, hence
my
> > lack of reply to that thread.
> >
> > The main problem Mantle currently solves is:
> > "... we both had a need to pass templates from the server to the
> > client via ResourceLoader. Mobile has been doing this for a year,
and
> > rather than another big project like
Flow reinventing the wheel, we
> > decided it was time to share code."
> >
> > To put it this way:
> > * it would be irresponsible to put code for 2 templating languages
> > (Hogan, Handlebars) into core
> > * it would be irresponsible to put code to serve templates with no
> > templating library whilst the RFC about templating is still
> > unresolved.
> > * it would be irresponsible for two teams to write exactly the same
> > code to serve templates to the client in 2 different extensions.
> >
> > Your own team member Timo was strongly against me putting this code
in
> core
in current form and I agreed with him.
>
> "We are paid, as professional software engineers, to write code that
> provides complete solutions, is stable, is clear how to use, doesn't
> break anything and meets MediaWiki's coding conventions"
>
> This particularly offends me by the way. This is a no brainer and of
> course any code Flow or the mobile team is writing will meet coding
> standards and be stable. I'm not going to post bad code to Wikimedia
> servers just as I'm not going to post non-generic non-standardised
> code to core.
>
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