Hi folks,

Bryan and I had an etherpad editing session, and rewrote the wiki page for
the project:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Library_infrastructure_for_MediaWiki

Please aggregate your ideas there, or on the talk page.

Summary of my response to Bryan:
*  Structured logging should be the first project
*  This project will probably get a lot of visibility soon enough
*  ResourceLoader as a library?
*  Docs can live on wiki
*  Bryan is awesome

More comments inline:

On Mon, Sep 29, 2014 at 11:07 PM, Bryan Davis <[email protected]> wrote:

> I know that I want to finish the logging work. I think this can be
> used as a good example of how to consume external libraries in
> MediaWiki core as well as helping solve a real deficiency in our
> existing code base.


Yup, I think this makes sense, and that seems to be the conclusion from our
conversation on Monday.  Let's roll with this.


> My RFC on the topic is a good start but the
> processes and procedures outlined there need to be published in a more
> visible place on wiki and battle tested for deficiencies.
>

Agreed.  The wiki page we have now is probably workable for this purpose,
but we may want to actually have an RFC to make this even more visible.
That said, I think if this ends up a top 5 priority, it'll get plenty of
visibility.


> I think I'd also like to see the Profiler work done as I've heard that
> many components in MediaWiki are basically only tied to logging and
> profiling. I'm totally willing to be persuaded that there is a better
> candidate for extracting into a library however. One question I'd like
> to ask is "what functionality from MediaWiki do you miss when you
> write a standalone PHP app?" Database? Caching? I18n bits and pieces?
> Is one of these more compelling for extracting and publishing than the
> profiler?
>

The idea that Bryan and I discussed as we were writing this up was
ResourceLoader, since it's one of the more obviously useful external
components.  It'd be quite an undertaking though, and would be a stretch
goal without significant help from Roan and Timo.

I'd also like to hear ideas about how we should be documenting the
> extracted libraries. Should we have a different workflow for
> generating docs from code? Is publishing docs as wiki pages a good,
> bad or meh idea?


I think generally pointing people at our wiki for full documentation is
probably fine for now, and is probably going to work as a long-term
strategy.  We should revisit this in a few months if it seems to be failing
in any way.

If we don't document on wiki how can we encourage
> document contributions from casual users? If we do document on wiki
> how can we ensure that changes in the API are propagated to the
> documentation soon after merge? How important is localization for code
> documentation?
>

What sort of in-tree documentation would you feel is necessary?  Seems to
me having relatively minimal in-tree documentation combined with richer
on-wiki documentation could be reasonably effective.


> In case you are wondering "who put Bryan in charge here?", the answer
> is RobLa. :) Following in the model of the HHVM project where Ori has
> been acting as project manager / product owner, RobLa has tapped me to
> take the lead on organizing the library infrastructure project if it
> gets green lighted. I'll need a lot of help since I still don't know
> as much about MediaWiki itself as our average 13 year old contributor,
> but I hope I can be of service with my experience in project and
> product management.
>

As always, Bryan is selling himself short.  :-)  Bryan has been an
effective advocate for doing this work, and it's great to see it get
traction in the wider org.

Rob
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