[Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)
Petr Bena
I am very disappointed by current development process we have on
wikimedia project. The wikimedia project itself is classified as open
source at some point, but the current development process sort of
beats the purpose of that.
I started working on two extensions in October, more than 6 months
ago. Both were approved by community on Village Pump and it was agreed
to deploy them to english wikipedia. One of the extension had hundreds
of lines and is considered as "bigger", the other one consist of +- 15
lines of code, which was developed together with Ian Baker who is
employee of the wikimedia foundation. I was told that in order to
deploy it, I need to pass code review. I requested code review many
times on many places and although it was more than 6 months ago, no
one seemed to be able to review these 15 lines of code so far, despite
the community agreed with the idea of extension.
I understand it, that only employees of the foundation are actually
permitted to write the code which is going to be deployed to wmf
sites. If that is true, it should be noted somewhere, so that
volunteers (the people who aren't employees / paid for that) can know
that spending time on creating such an extensions, will likely result
in it never going to be implemented, thus it's not anything they are
suggested to do.
While this is secure for the foundation, so that it can actually have
perfect control over the code which is wikimedia running on, it is
sort of against the idea of open software.
So, it should be either described how this works, because if what I
just said is true (I hope it's not) it should be definitely somewhere
noted, to avoid getting more volunteers spending time on pointless
work, or the development process should be completely changed so that
it allows this "open source" project, to be actually open.
Thank you
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Svip
My NaturalLanguageList extension[1] has been queued for code review
since March 2010.[2] And I still believe WMF wikis like Wiktionary
and Commons would greatly benefit from such an extension. At least
until the Lua-wikicode thing gets worked out.
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:NaturalLanguageList
[2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22928
K. Peachey
> I started working on two extensions in October, more than 6 months
> ago. Both were approved by community on Village Pump and it was agreed
> to deploy them to english wikipedia. One of the extension had hundreds
> of lines and is considered as "bigger", the other one consist of +- 15
> lines of code, which was developed together with Ian Baker who is
> employee of the wikimedia foundation.
> I was told that in order to
> deploy it, I need to pass code review. I requested code review many
> times on many places and although it was more than 6 months ago, no
> one seemed to be able to review these 15 lines of code so far
Who? Where?, Have you tried asking Tim or Roan on IRC?.
> I understand it, that only employees of the foundation are actually
> permitted to write the code which is going to be deployed to wmf
> sites.
No, Everyone is. Just everything requires review before being pushed
to the site and there is a smaller pool of those compared to those
commit code (thus, Backlogs can occur). Since general MW code is
reviewed by many eyes (Since its generally used by more people)
compared to extensions which generally aren't reviewed as much in our
normal code review process.
> If that is true, it should be noted somewhere, so that
> volunteers (the people who aren't employees / paid for that) can know
> that spending time on creating such an extensions, will likely result
> in it never going to be implemented, thus it's not anything they are
> suggested to do.
>
> While this is secure for the foundation, so that it can actually have
> perfect control over the code which is wikimedia running on, it is
> sort of against the idea of open software.
If that was the case, Half (by a small guess) of MediaWiki wouldn't exist.
Some extensions that come to mind (Attached names are rough memory)
* E:WikimediaIncubator - SQRobin
* E:APISandbox - MaxSem (before he was a contractor)
* E:AssertEdit - sanbeg
* E:CategoryTree - Daniel K (i'm fairly certain, but not postive)
* E:CLDR - Niklas iirc
* E:ContactPage - Daniel K
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Extensions_used_on_Wikimedia
will find you otheres I'm sure.
(CCing Tim/Roan since I mentioned their names, In the style I did).
Amir E. Aharoni
> I understand it, that only employees of the foundation are actually
> permitted to write the code which is going to be deployed to wmf
> sites. If that is true, it should be noted somewhere, so that
> volunteers (the people who aren't employees / paid for that) can know
> that spending time on creating such an extensions, will likely result
> in it never going to be implemented, thus it's not anything they are
> suggested to do.
This is not correct - extensions by volunteers are deployed. To cite
just two notable examples, Cite and CategoryTree. AFAIK, neither Ævar
nor Daniel are or were paid by the WMF; Daniel works at WM-DE, but
that's a separate organization.
That said, better documentation about the Foundation's process for
deciding what is deployed would be quite useful.
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
Petr Bena
> On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 6:19 PM, Petr Bena <bena...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I started working on two extensions in October, more than 6 months
>> ago. Both were approved by community on Village Pump and it was agreed
>> to deploy them to english wikipedia. One of the extension had hundreds
>> of lines and is considered as "bigger", the other one consist of +- 15
>> lines of code, which was developed together with Ian Baker who is
>> employee of the wikimedia foundation.
>
>> I was told that in order to
>> deploy it, I need to pass code review. I requested code review many
>> times on many places and although it was more than 6 months ago, no
>> one seemed to be able to review these 15 lines of code so far
>
> Who? Where?, Have you tried asking Tim or Roan on IRC?.
>
Yes, many times
I asked on irc so many times I stopped counting, I created few
bugzilla tickets, informed many developers who are working for wmf,
and Mark Hershberger (I think there are many more who knew about it)
>
>> I understand it, that only employees of the foundation are actually
>> permitted to write the code which is going to be deployed to wmf
>> sites.
>
> No, Everyone is. Just everything requires review before being pushed
> to the site and there is a smaller pool of those compared to those
> commit code (thus, Backlogs can occur). Since general MW code is
> reviewed by many eyes (Since its generally used by more people)
> compared to extensions which generally aren't reviewed as much in our
> normal code review process.
>
Review takes so long that until it actually happen, the extension may
not be needed anymore (read the first response - 2 years waiting for
review and now it seems that a new technology will be implemented
which may do similar stuff as extension itself)
>> If that is true, it should be noted somewhere, so that
>> volunteers (the people who aren't employees / paid for that) can know
>> that spending time on creating such an extensions, will likely result
>> in it never going to be implemented, thus it's not anything they are
>> suggested to do.
>>
>> While this is secure for the foundation, so that it can actually have
>> perfect control over the code which is wikimedia running on, it is
>> sort of against the idea of open software.
>
> If that was the case, Half (by a small guess) of MediaWiki wouldn't exist.
>
> Some extensions that come to mind (Attached names are rough memory)
>
> * E:WikimediaIncubator - SQRobin
> * E:APISandbox - MaxSem (before he was a contractor)
> * E:AssertEdit - sanbeg
> * E:CategoryTree - Daniel K (i'm fairly certain, but not postive)
> * E:CLDR - Niklas iirc
> * E:ContactPage - Daniel K
>
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Extensions_used_on_Wikimedia
> will find you otheres I'm sure.
>
I don't say it didn't work in past, I say it's broken right now.