[Moving threads for on-topic-ness.]
On 16 January 2015 at 07:01, Brian Wolff bawolff@gmail.com wrote:
Does anyone actually have anything they want that is difficult to do currently and requires a mass compat break?
Sure.
Three quick examples of things on the horizon (I'm not particularly saying we'd actually do these for Wikimedia's use, but if you're going to ask for straw man arguments… :-)):
- Get rid of wikitext on the server-side. - HTML storage only. Remove MWParser from the codebase. All extensions that hook into wikitext (so, almost all of them?) will need to be re-written. - Real-time collaborative editing. - Huge semantic change to the concept of a 'revision'; we'd probably need to re-structure the table from scratch. Breaking change for many tools in core and elsewhere. - Replace local PHP hooks with proper services interfaces instead. - Loads of opportunities for improvements here (anti-spam tools 'as a service', Wordpress style; pre-flighting saves; ), but again, pretty much everything will need re-writing; this would likely be "progressive", happening one at a time to areas where it's useful/wanted/needed, but it's still a huge breaking change for many extensions.
Proposing to rewrite mediawiki because we can without even a notion of what we would want to do differently seems silly.
Oh, absolutely. I think RobLa's point was that it's unclear who feels empowered to make that decision (rather than the pitch). I don't. I don't think RobLa does. Clearly the Architecture Committee don't.
J.