Re: [Wikitech-l] ResourceLoader, now in trunk!

2010-09-07 Thread Roan Kattouw
2010/9/7 Platonides platoni...@gmail.com:
 I see. It would have to be a hook into the resource loader.
You don't need a hook in the server-side PHP part of the resource
loader, as determining which modules to load on that side is already
supported. The Gadgets extension's PHP code could inspect variables
like $wgTitle-getNamespace() and determine whether to load a certain
gadget or not. This is easy as far as the resource loader goes, but it
does mean the server has to make this decision based on information in
the gadget's code or the gadget definition page. This is significantly
less flexible than allowing a gadget to just provide a JS function
that returns true or false, but the fact that the decision has to be
made client-side makes it a bit trickier. It's still very much doable,
although the way I proposed is a little bit hacky and we may want to
have the client-side loader support this better.

Or did you mean a hook into the client-side loader?

Roan Kattouw (Catrope)

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Re: [Wikitech-l] ResourceLoader, now in trunk!

2010-09-07 Thread Roan Kattouw
2010/9/7 Dmitriy Sintsov ques...@rambler.ru:
 Do browsers support streamed and combined (archive-like) gz-encoded
 content? Then probably minifying will not be neccessary.
Minification makes a shocking difference: remember that it's not just
whitespace being stripped, it's comments as well. For example, in
/trunk/extensions/UsabilityInitiative/js we have:

plugins.combined.js: 259281 bytes
plugins.combined.min.js: 142565 bytes
plugins.combined.js.gz: 65569 bytes
plugins.combined.min.js.gz: 32740 bytes

So not only is the minified JS roughly half the size in both the
compressed and the uncompressed cases, it actually /compresses better/
(3.95x vs. 4.35x).

 Also, it would
 be great if these high-level JS-libraries like jQuery actually were
 ported into DOM API level (native browser's implementation instead of
 extra JS layer). However, these questions are to FF/IE/Opera
 developers...
I definitely think this is the future, provided it's implemented
reliably cross-browser. Also, you'd probably want to have a fallback
library for browsers that have no or incomplete (e.g. missing a jQuery
feature that's newer than the browser) native support.

Roan Kattouw (Catrope)

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Re: [Wikitech-l] ResourceLoader, now in trunk!

2010-09-07 Thread Tim Starling
On 07/09/10 17:44, Roan Kattouw wrote:
 2010/9/7 Dmitriy Sintsov ques...@rambler.ru:
 Do browsers support streamed and combined (archive-like) gz-encoded
 content? Then probably minifying will not be neccessary.
 Minification makes a shocking difference: remember that it's not just
 whitespace being stripped, it's comments as well. For example, in
 /trunk/extensions/UsabilityInitiative/js we have:
 
 plugins.combined.js: 259281 bytes
 plugins.combined.min.js: 142565 bytes
 plugins.combined.js.gz: 65569 bytes
 plugins.combined.min.js.gz: 32740 bytes
 
 So not only is the minified JS roughly half the size in both the
 compressed and the uncompressed cases, it actually /compresses better/
 (3.95x vs. 4.35x).

Note that the advantage of minification is somewhat inflated due to
the nature of the source. There seems to be a because we can element
to it: because the developers are so impressed by the concept of
minification, they write excessively verbose and excessively many
comments. For example:

// create the span wrapper for the matched text
var spannode = document.createElement( 'span' );
spannode.className = 'highlight';
// shave off the characters preceding the matched text
var middlebit = node.splitText( pos );
// shave off any unmatched text off the end
middlebit.splitText( pat.length );
// clone for appending to our span
var middleclone = middlebit.cloneNode( true );
// append the matched text node to the span
spannode.appendChild( middleclone );
// replace the matched node, with our span-wrapped clone of the
matched node
middlebit.parentNode.replaceChild( spannode, middlebit );

Or a doc comment:

/**
 * This plugin provides a generic way to add suggestions to a text box.
 *
 * Usage:
 *
 * Set options:
 *  $('#textbox').suggestions( { option1: value1, option2: value2 } 
);
 *  $('#textbox').suggestions( option, value );
 * Get option:
 *  value = $('#textbox').suggestions( option );
 * Initialize:
 *  $('#textbox').suggestions();
 *
 * Options:
 *
 * fetch(query): Callback that should fetch suggestions and set the
suggestions property. Executed in the context of the
 *  textbox
 *  Type: Function
 * cancel: Callback function to call when any pending asynchronous
suggestions fetches should be canceled.
 *  Executed in the context of the textbox
 *  Type: Function
 * special: Set of callbacks for rendering and selecting
 *  Type: Object of Functions 'render' and 'select'
 * result: Set of callbacks for rendering and selecting
 *  Type: Object of Functions 'render' and 'select'
 * $region: jQuery selection of element to place the suggestions below
and match width of
 *  Type: jQuery Object, Default: $(this)
 * suggestions: Suggestions to display
 *  Type: Array of strings
 * maxRows: Maximum number of suggestions to display at one time
 *  Type: Number, Range: 1 - 100, Default: 7
 * delay: Number of ms to wait for the user to stop typing
 *  Type: Number, Range: 0 - 1200, Default: 120
 * submitOnClick: Whether to submit the form containing the textbox
when a suggestion is clicked
 *  Type: Boolean, Default: false
 * maxExpandFactor: Maximum suggestions box width relative to the
textbox width.  If set to e.g. 2, the suggestions box
 *  will never be grown beyond 2 times the width of the textbox.
 *  Type: Number, Range: 1 - infinity, Default: 3
 * positionFromLeft: Whether to position the suggestion box with the
left attribute or the right
 *  Type: Boolean, Default: true
 * highlightInput: Whether to hightlight matched portions of the input
or not
 *  Type: Boolean, Default: false
 */

I think it's ironic that this style arises in JavaScript, given that
it's a high-level language and relatively easy to understand, and that
you could make a technical case in favour of terseness. C has an
equally effective minification technique known as compilation, and its
practitioners tend to be terse to a fault. For instance, many Linux
kernel modules have no comments at all, except for the license header.

-- Tim Starling


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Re: [Wikitech-l] ResourceLoader, now in trunk!

2010-09-07 Thread Roan Kattouw
2010/9/7 Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org:
 Note that the advantage of minification is somewhat inflated due to
 the nature of the source. There seems to be a because we can element
 to it: because the developers are so impressed by the concept of
 minification, they write excessively verbose and excessively many
 comments. For example:

[...]

 I think it's ironic that this style arises in JavaScript, given that
 it's a high-level language and relatively easy to understand, and that
 you could make a technical case in favour of terseness. C has an
 equally effective minification technique known as compilation, and its
 practitioners tend to be terse to a fault. For instance, many Linux
 kernel modules have no comments at all, except for the license header.

I don't think terseness is a good thing necessarily. Some comments are
unnecessarily verbose, yes (your first example, for instance), but I
think Javadoc-style comments for non-trivial functions are essential,
and class/file/interface comments describing an interface other code
can interact with (your second example) are also very useful. Both,
especially the former, are used throughout MediaWiki's PHP code, and
the JS code is no exception. I also don't think that the verbosity you
mentioned is caused by a because we can mentality, but rather by the
authors themselves: 2 of the 3 main authors of UsabilityInitiative
have a habit of writing verbose comments, both in JS and in PHP. (I
remember you criticizing PHP code written by Trevor in July 2009 for
containing comments verbose to the point of almost insulting the
reader's intelligence.) However, clear and adequately complete
documentation should not be confused for excessive verbosity. I agree
that your second example is a long doc comment, but I don't think it's
excessive for what it's supposed to be documenting (the interface to
.suggestions(), which takes 12 arguments of various types and with
various semantics, allowed values and default values).

Roan Kattouw (Catrope)

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Re: [Wikitech-l] ResourceLoader, now in trunk!

2010-09-07 Thread Marco Schuster
Hi,

On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 9:44 AM, Roan Kattouw roan.katt...@gmail.com wrote:
 Also, it would
 be great if these high-level JS-libraries like jQuery actually were
 ported into DOM API level (native browser's implementation instead of
 extra JS layer). However, these questions are to FF/IE/Opera
 developers...
 I definitely think this is the future, provided it's implemented
 reliably cross-browser. Also, you'd probably want to have a fallback
 library for browsers that have no or incomplete (e.g. missing a jQuery
 feature that's newer than the browser) native support.
Please, no. The various browsers all have their problems with
standards even now, and I don't expect they'd get a jquery (or
whatever JS framework) clientside implemented without having all sorts
of problems.

Marco
-- 
VMSoft GbR
Nabburger Str. 15
81737 München
Geschäftsführer: Marco Schuster, Volker Hemmert
http://vmsoft-gbr.de

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Selenium Framework - test run configuration data

2010-09-07 Thread Benedikt Kaempgen
Hi,

Great, that there is some further discussion and progress in Selenium testing 
going on.

However, up to now I have been following the manual at [1] which Markus Glaser 
has updated recently but which now is out-of-date. I have figured out some of 
your changes and almost got the framework working. But still, 
SimpleSeleniumTestSuite/SimpleSeleniumTestCase do not work due to a 
call_user_func_array() error. Apparently, some methods cannot be found.

I was wondering whether it would be possible to update the manual at [1] if 
there are any changes to the framework concerning its usage.

Regards,

Benedikt


--
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods (AIFB)

Benedikt Kämpgen
Research Associate

Kaiserstraße 12
Building 11.40
76131 Karlsruhe, Germany

Phone: +49 721 608-7946
Fax: +49 721 608-6580
Email: benedikt.kaemp...@kit.edu
Web: http://www.kit.edu/

KIT - University of the State of Baden-Wuerttemberg and
National Research Center of the Helmholtz Association


-Original Message-
From: wikitech-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org 
[mailto:wikitech-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Mark A. Hershberger
Sent: Tuesday, September 07, 2010 5:15 AM
To: Wikimedia developers
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Selenium Framework - test run configuration data

Dan Nessett dness...@yahoo.com writes:

 Last Friday, mah ripped out the globals and put the configuration
 information into the execute method of RunSeleniumTests.php with the
 comment @todo Add an alternative where settings are read from an INI
 file. So, it seems we have dueling developers with contrary ideas about
 what is the best way to configure selenium framework tests.

I'm opposed to increasing global variables and I think I understand
Tim's concern about configuring via a PHP file.

I plan to start work on reading the configuration from an INI file
(*not* a PHP file).

 Either approach works. But, by going back and forth, it makes development
 of functionality for the Framework difficult.

I agree.

The idea I was pursuing is to encapsulate configuration in a Selenium
object that (right now) RunSeleniumTests.php will set up.

Platonides suggestion of a hook to provide configuration is also doable.

Mark.

--
http://hexmode.com/

Embrace Ignorance.  Just don't get too attached.

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Selenium Framework - test run configuration data

2010-09-07 Thread Mark A. Hershberger
Dan Nessett dness...@yahoo.com writes:

 Either approach works. But, by going back and forth, it makes development
 of functionality for the Framework difficult.

I should also point out that what I was planning to do was not hidden.
I wrote about these changes in my weekly report the Monday before I
committed them (http://bit.ly/cqAcqz) and pointed to the weekly report
from my Ohloh, Twitter, Identi.ca and Facebook accounts.

Granted, this is not the same as posting to the mailing list, and for
that I apologize.

Looking back in the archives on gmane, it looks like you are very
interested in MW testing.  Since this is a large part of my focus
currently as well, perhaps we should coordinate our work?

Mark.

-- 
http://hexmode.com/

Embrace Ignorance.  Just don't get too attached.

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Selenium Framework - test run configuration data

2010-09-07 Thread Dan Nessett
On Mon, 06 Sep 2010 23:15:06 -0400, Mark A. Hershberger wrote:

 Dan Nessett dness...@yahoo.com writes:
 
 Last Friday, mah ripped out the globals and put the configuration
 information into the execute method of RunSeleniumTests.php with the
 comment @todo Add an alternative where settings are read from an INI
 file. So, it seems we have dueling developers with contrary ideas
 about what is the best way to configure selenium framework tests.
 
 I'm opposed to increasing global variables and I think I understand
 Tim's concern about configuring via a PHP file.
 
 I plan to start work on reading the configuration from an INI file
 (*not* a PHP file).
 
 Either approach works. But, by going back and forth, it makes
 development of functionality for the Framework difficult.
 
 I agree.
 
 The idea I was pursuing is to encapsulate configuration in a Selenium
 object that (right now) RunSeleniumTests.php will set up.
 
 Platonides suggestion of a hook to provide configuration is also doable.
 
 Mark.

I am pretty much agreeable to any solution that remains stable. One thing 
that may not be obvious is there may be configuration data over and above 
that specified on the RunSeleniumTests command line.

For example, it is inconvenient to have to start up the selenium server 
before running RunSeleniumTests. (In the past I have frequently executed 
RunSeleniumTests only to get an error because I forgot to start the 
server). I supplied a patch to Markus recently that adds two options to 
the command line, one to start the server and the other to stop it (the 
patch supplies functionality only for *nix systems, which is probably why 
Markus has not committed it - there needs to be similar support for 
Windows). This functionality requires a directory path to the selenium 
server jar file. This is not something that a tester would normally 
supply on a command line. It is a system, not a test run parameter.

So, I hope the INI file processing you are working on will allow the 
specification of such data.

-- 
-- Dan Nessett


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Re: [Wikitech-l] Selenium Framework - test run configuration data

2010-09-07 Thread dan nessett
I would be happy to coordinate with you. Up to this point I have been working 
with Markus Glaser and that has gone pretty well. But, I would welcome more 
discussion on issues, architecture and implementation strategy for the 
Framework as well as making sure anything I do fits in with what others are 
doing.

Regards,

Dan

--- On Tue, 9/7/10, Mark A. Hershberger m...@everybody.org wrote:

 From: Mark A. Hershberger m...@everybody.org
 Subject: Re: Selenium Framework - test run configuration data
 To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
 Cc: Dan Nessett dness...@yahoo.com
 Date: Tuesday, September 7, 2010, 8:04 AM
 Dan Nessett dness...@yahoo.com
 writes:
 
  Either approach works. But, by going back and forth,
 it makes development
  of functionality for the Framework difficult.
 
 I should also point out that what I was planning to do was
 not hidden.
 I wrote about these changes in my weekly report the Monday
 before I
 committed them (http://bit.ly/cqAcqz) and pointed to the
 weekly report
 from my Ohloh, Twitter, Identi.ca and Facebook accounts.
 
 Granted, this is not the same as posting to the mailing
 list, and for
 that I apologize.
 
 Looking back in the archives on gmane, it looks like you
 are very
 interested in MW testing.  Since this is a large part
 of my focus
 currently as well, perhaps we should coordinate our work?
 
 Mark.
 
 -- 
 http://hexmode.com/
 
 Embrace Ignorance.  Just don't get too attached.
 


  

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Selenium Framework - test run configuration data

2010-09-07 Thread Markus Glaser
Hi all,

I suggest we have one static class variable Selenium::$settings which is set up 
as an array. This array would be filled in some init function from whatever 
sources we decide on. Then, internally, the configuration mechanisms would not 
change anymore, and we could use the init method to fill the settings from 
globals (as is) or ini files (as Mark propses). Those who use the framework, 
however, would not have to rewrite their code.

Regards,
Markus

Markus Glaser
Social Web Technologien
Leiter Softwareentwicklung
Hallo Welt! - Medienwerkstatt GmbH
__

Untere Bachgasse 15
93047 Regensburg

Tel.   +49 (0) 941 - 56 95 94 92
Fax.  +49 (0) 941 - 50 27 58 13


www.hallowelt.biz
gla...@hallowelt.biz

Sitz: Regensburg
Handelsregister: HRB 10467
E.USt.Nr.: DE 253050833
Geschäftsführer:
Anja Ebersbach, Markus Glaser, 
Dr. Richard Heigl, Radovan Kubani


-Ursprüngliche Nachricht-
Von: wikitech-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org 
[mailto:wikitech-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] Im Auftrag von dan nessett
Gesendet: Dienstag, 7. September 2010 17:20
An: Wikimedia developers; Mark A. Hershberger
Betreff: Re: [Wikitech-l] Selenium Framework - test run configuration data

I would be happy to coordinate with you. Up to this point I have been working 
with Markus Glaser and that has gone pretty well. But, I would welcome more 
discussion on issues, architecture and implementation strategy for the 
Framework as well as making sure anything I do fits in with what others are 
doing.

Regards,

Dan

--- On Tue, 9/7/10, Mark A. Hershberger m...@everybody.org wrote:

 From: Mark A. Hershberger m...@everybody.org
 Subject: Re: Selenium Framework - test run configuration data
 To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
 Cc: Dan Nessett dness...@yahoo.com
 Date: Tuesday, September 7, 2010, 8:04 AM Dan Nessett 
 dness...@yahoo.com
 writes:
 
  Either approach works. But, by going back and forth,
 it makes development
  of functionality for the Framework difficult.
 
 I should also point out that what I was planning to do was not hidden.
 I wrote about these changes in my weekly report the Monday before I 
 committed them (http://bit.ly/cqAcqz) and pointed to the weekly report 
 from my Ohloh, Twitter, Identi.ca and Facebook accounts.
 
 Granted, this is not the same as posting to the mailing list, and for 
 that I apologize.
 
 Looking back in the archives on gmane, it looks like you are very 
 interested in MW testing.  Since this is a large part of my focus 
 currently as well, perhaps we should coordinate our work?
 
 Mark.
 
 --
 http://hexmode.com/
 
 Embrace Ignorance.  Just don't get too attached.
 


  

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Re: [Wikitech-l] list of proposed fundraising stimuli (was Re: fundraising...)

2010-09-07 Thread Ryan Kaldari
Just to be clear, we are not doing fundraising earmarks for the 2010 
fundraiser. As I mentioned earlier, this was discussed earlier in the 
year and ruled out for the current fundraiser. Any such plan would need 
thorough discussion, both with the community and the WMF. In addition, 
we usually start planning our testing methodology and analytics goals 4 
or 5 months ahead of the fundraiser so that development can be completed 
well before the fundraiser begins. That said, I think earmarks are 
definitely an idea that should be discussed for the future. Did you have 
any thoughts on the objections that I listed in the previous email? 
Right now the Foundation is generally opposed to the idea of fundraising 
earmarks, so we would need to address those objections before we start 
talking about any implementation details.

Thanks for the R links. The research and analytics people here are very 
big fans of R. The links you sent look like they could be useful for us.

Ryan Kaldari

On 9/4/10 3:26 PM, James Salsman wrote:
 It's great to see that donor logs are going in to a database instead
 of just a text file, but multiple regression in SQL is absurdly
 difficult because of the limitations of SQL, so I still recommend R,
 in particular: http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RMySQL/RMySQL.pdf
 and http://wiener.math.csi.cuny.edu/Statistics/R/simpleR/stat006.html
 I will ask Arthur Richards for data coding formats.

 I predict that multiple response checkboxes will do better than the
 more constraining radio buttons, but there is no reason that they
 should not be measured as any other independent variable. It is
 probably a lot more important to measure the number of earmarks
 offered: 0-26.  There is plenty of reason to believe that showing 26
 options will have a slight advantage over 25, but I can't see the test
 results from the Red Cross (they measure the things which increase
 donations of blood much more carefully than money, at least in their
 publications that I've been able to find.) Don't forget the control
 case where no donor selections are offered. Optimization requires
 measurement, and it is easy to measure offering a lot of options up
 front.

 Do you think that variations on the disclaimer should also be tried?
 I think there is reason to believe something terse might result in
 more donations, e.g.: These options are advisory only. and/or The
 Wikimedia Foundation reserves the right to override donor selections,
 cancel any project, and use any funds for any purpose. and/or All
 donations are discretionary, these options are offered for polling
 purposes only. or some combination.  What does Mike Godwin think a
 good set of disclaimers to test might be?

 I conflated the proposed stimulus list down to 25 non-default items
 and enumerated them with letters of the alphabet so that everyone
 would understand that it is feasible to test additional proposals as
 well.  I have not yet surveyed the Village Pumps or mailing lists for
 additional stimulatory ideas but I hope people who have or who see
 anything missing will suggest at least five more. Translations would
 be great, too.

 (default) Use my donation where the need is greatest.
 A. Auction the order of search failover links to search engine companies.
 B. Broaden demographics of active editors.
 C. Compensate people who submit improvements to the extent that they
 are necessary and sufficient.
 D. Display most popular related articles.
 E. Enhance automation of project tasks.
 F. Enhance site performance in underserved geographic regions.
 G. Enhance visualizations of projects and their editing activity.
 H. Establish journalism awards, expense accounts and compensation for
 independent Wikinews reporters, fact checkers, photographers and
 proofreaders.
 I. Establish secure off-site backup copies.
 J. Establish simple Wikipedias for beginning readers in languages
 other than English.
 K. Improve math formula rendering.
 L. Increase the number of active editors.
 M. Increase the number of articles, images, and files.
 N. Increase the number of unique readers.
 O. Make it easier for people to add recorded audio pronunciations.
 P. Obtain expert article assessments.
 Q. Obtain reader quality assessments.
 R. Perform external code reviews.
 S. Perform independent usability testing.
 T. Produce regular snapshots and archives.
 U. Retain more active editors.
 V. Strengthen Wikimedia Foundation financial stability.
 W. Support a thriving research community.
 X. Support an easier format to write quiz questions.
 Y. Support more reliable server uptime.
 Z. Support offline editing.

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Re: [Wikitech-l] fundraising earmarks for code review, image bundle dumps, search failover auction, Wikinews independence, bugzilla queue maintenance etc.

2010-09-07 Thread Ryan Kaldari

 My contributions for audio recording uploads are not ready because
 they depend on the upload redesign and client-side Flash.  I am still
 waiting to hear from anyone why the current state of Flash is any less
 closed than that of Java.  I am willing to give the benefit of the
 doubt that people have simply not researched the situation with
 Adobe's current public documentation and license along with the state
 of Haxe and Gnash, but in the mean time I can wait for the upload
 redesign before I take up that issue in earnest.  I'm also trying to
 raise money for Gnash developers to make that particular hurdle a
 complete non-issue.
I would love to see Flash/Gnash support on Commons, but as far as I 
know, it isn't currently in the development pipeline (and as you said, 
their is still lingering cultural resistance to anything Flash-related, 
despite the emergence of projects like GPLFlash and Gnash). If you want 
to use Flash for uploads in the meantime, you can set-up an uploading 
front-end on the toolserver. I have a Flash-based uploading front-end 
for Commons on there myself that I use for doing multi-file uploads.

Ryan Kaldari

On 9/6/10 1:43 PM, James Salsman wrote:
 Tim Starling wrote:

 I meant the code: CentralNotice, DonationInterface, GeoLite,
 ContactPageFundraiser, the Drupal extension, etc.
  
 What remains to be done on those projects?  The only unassigned bug of
 any immediately apparent consequence on any of those keywords I was
 able to find is bug 24682 which looks like it might have a patch
 already described in it.


 I didn't think you were a committer.
  
 My contributions for audio recording uploads are not ready because
 they depend on the upload redesign and client-side Flash.  I am still
 waiting to hear from anyone why the current state of Flash is any less
 closed than that of Java.  I am willing to give the benefit of the
 doubt that people have simply not researched the situation with
 Adobe's current public documentation and license along with the state
 of Haxe and Gnash, but in the mean time I can wait for the upload
 redesign before I take up that issue in earnest.  I'm also trying to
 raise money for Gnash developers to make that particular hurdle a
 complete non-issue.

 Perhaps there are Mediawiki users other than the Foundation who would
 not be opposed to the use of Flash for microphone audio upload?

 Best regards,
 James Salsman

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Re: [Wikitech-l] ResourceLoader, now in trunk!

2010-09-07 Thread Daniel Friesen
Tim Starling wrote:
 On 07/09/10 17:44, Roan Kattouw wrote:
   
 2010/9/7 Dmitriy Sintsov ques...@rambler.ru:
 
 Do browsers support streamed and combined (archive-like) gz-encoded
 content? Then probably minifying will not be neccessary.
   
 Minification makes a shocking difference: remember that it's not just
 whitespace being stripped, it's comments as well. For example, in
 /trunk/extensions/UsabilityInitiative/js we have:

 plugins.combined.js: 259281 bytes
 plugins.combined.min.js: 142565 bytes
 plugins.combined.js.gz: 65569 bytes
 plugins.combined.min.js.gz: 32740 bytes

 So not only is the minified JS roughly half the size in both the
 compressed and the uncompressed cases, it actually /compresses better/
 (3.95x vs. 4.35x).
 

 Note that the advantage of minification is somewhat inflated due to
 the nature of the source. There seems to be a because we can element
 to it: because the developers are so impressed by the concept of
 minification, they write excessively verbose and excessively many
 comments. For example:

 // create the span wrapper for the matched text
 var spannode = document.createElement( 'span' );
 spannode.className = 'highlight';
 // shave off the characters preceding the matched text
 var middlebit = node.splitText( pos );
 // shave off any unmatched text off the end
 middlebit.splitText( pat.length );
 // clone for appending to our span
 var middleclone = middlebit.cloneNode( true );
 // append the matched text node to the span
 spannode.appendChild( middleclone );
 // replace the matched node, with our span-wrapped clone of the
 matched node
 middlebit.parentNode.replaceChild( spannode, middlebit );

 Or a doc comment:

 /**
  * This plugin provides a generic way to add suggestions to a text box.
  *
  * Usage:
  *
  * Set options:
  *$('#textbox').suggestions( { option1: value1, option2: value2 } 
 );
  *$('#textbox').suggestions( option, value );
  * Get option:
  *value = $('#textbox').suggestions( option );
  * Initialize:
  *$('#textbox').suggestions();
  *
  * Options:
  *
  * fetch(query): Callback that should fetch suggestions and set the
 suggestions property. Executed in the context of the
  *textbox
  *Type: Function
  * cancel: Callback function to call when any pending asynchronous
 suggestions fetches should be canceled.
  *Executed in the context of the textbox
  *Type: Function
  * special: Set of callbacks for rendering and selecting
  *Type: Object of Functions 'render' and 'select'
  * result: Set of callbacks for rendering and selecting
  *Type: Object of Functions 'render' and 'select'
  * $region: jQuery selection of element to place the suggestions below
 and match width of
  *Type: jQuery Object, Default: $(this)
  * suggestions: Suggestions to display
  *Type: Array of strings
  * maxRows: Maximum number of suggestions to display at one time
  *Type: Number, Range: 1 - 100, Default: 7
  * delay: Number of ms to wait for the user to stop typing
  *Type: Number, Range: 0 - 1200, Default: 120
  * submitOnClick: Whether to submit the form containing the textbox
 when a suggestion is clicked
  *Type: Boolean, Default: false
  * maxExpandFactor: Maximum suggestions box width relative to the
 textbox width.  If set to e.g. 2, the suggestions box
  *will never be grown beyond 2 times the width of the textbox.
  *Type: Number, Range: 1 - infinity, Default: 3
  * positionFromLeft: Whether to position the suggestion box with the
 left attribute or the right
  *Type: Boolean, Default: true
  * highlightInput: Whether to hightlight matched portions of the input
 or not
  *Type: Boolean, Default: false
  */

 I think it's ironic that this style arises in JavaScript, given that
 it's a high-level language and relatively easy to understand, and that
 you could make a technical case in favour of terseness. C has an
 equally effective minification technique known as compilation, and its
 practitioners tend to be terse to a fault. For instance, many Linux
 kernel modules have no comments at all, except for the license header.

 -- Tim Starling
   
This brings up a question, what's the comparison between unminified,
minified, just stripping comments, and their gzipped versions?
Does minified+gzipped provide any significant size savings over simple
commentstripped+gzipped?

If not, then there's something to say about that since only erasing
comments would still make debugging somewhat doable since you should be
able to get a good enough line number to use find with some nearby code
to track down where the bug is. (You also won't run into server-side js
syntax-error issues due to needing to minify actual code)

~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]

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[Wikitech-l] Incremental dumps on download

2010-09-07 Thread Antoine Amarilli
Hi all,

I was wondering if there are any plans to provide incremental dumps (ie.
the diff between each dump and the previous one) at
download.wikimedia.org. It seems to me that such diffs would help save
bandwidth because mirrors could stay up to date by downloading the diffs
and applying them rather than downloading the whole dump each time.

I am new here, so I hope that this mailing-list is the correct place for
this kind of suggestions. If I am wrong, please tell me.

Regards,

-- 
Antoine Amarilli


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Re: [Wikitech-l] ResourceLoader, now in trunk!

2010-09-07 Thread Aryeh Gregor
On Mon, Sep 6, 2010 at 10:59 PM, Dmitriy Sintsov ques...@rambler.ru wrote:
 Do browsers support streamed and combined (archive-like) gz-encoded
 content? Then probably minifying will not be neccessary.

Currently this is only readily obtainable by just concatenating the
files.  HTTP pipelining would negate most of the point of resource
combining if it actually worked in practice, but it tends to break in
hard-to-catch ways due to transparent proxies that don't support it
correctly.  Opera reportedly does pipelining with some sort of
heuristic or fallback behavior so it works reliably.  Firefox supports
pipelining, but it's off by default because of the problems it causes:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=264354

Another proposal in the making to allow this sort of combining more
easily is Resource Packages, a Mozilla proposal:

http://people.mozilla.com/~jlebar/respkg/

This is supposed to make it into the next Firefox after 4.0 last I
heard.  Resource packages are easy to deploy (meaning no web server
changes required), but they have to be maintained manually, and have
other inherent limitations.

The medium-to-long-term development that's expected to address this
problem is SPDY, a proposal by Google:

http://www.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-whitepaper

The major drawback is that it not only requires considerable
server-side changes, it also doesn't work with HTTP proxies.  In the
end, it will probably be usable only over SSL, but that might not be
such a big issue with DNSSEC finally becoming a reality -- the root
zone has been signed, .com and .net will be within a year, and people
are thinking about how to use DNSSEC to allow HTTPS without having to
pay a CA for a certificate:

http://www.imperialviolet.org/2010/08/16/dnssectls.html

But SPDY has major advantages, basically being a rewrite of the HTTP
wire format for performance, while preserving HTTP semantics (so
applications will still be given the same headers, etc.).

So, yes, this problem is being worked on.  :)  None of it will
obsolete minification, though, as Roan points out.

 Also, it would
 be great if these high-level JS-libraries like jQuery actually were
 ported into DOM API level (native browser's implementation instead of
 extra JS layer).

This is not going to happen.  jQuery is way too complicated to be a
reasonable target for interoperable implementation.  Furthermore, part
of the goal of jQuery is to be a compatibility layer so that all
browsers look the same even across many years of releases, and this
isn't possible if it's native, so some extra layer will always be
needed.  Instead, implementers work on making popular libraries like
jQuery work faster and better, including moving select features to a
native implementation when that will improve performance a lot (e.g.,
querySelector()).

 However, these questions are to FF/IE/Opera developers...

Don't forget Chrome and Safari.  I'm not a web browser developer, but
I work with web standards a lot, so I'm fairly informed on this sort
of thing.

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Database drivers

2010-09-07 Thread Leons Petrazickis
On Sun, Sep 5, 2010 at 22:56, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote:

 It would be great if the maintainers of the less-commonly used DBMSes
 could write up development guides and put them in phase3/docs. These
 guides could describe relevant differences in SQL syntax compared to
 MySQL, and explain how to write schema files.


I have a reference table for the MySQL, Postgres, and DB2 data types in the
current schema on the wiki:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:IBM_DB2#SQL_data_types

It's somewhat hard to predict what the important differences in SQL syntax
would be. Is there anything specific that comes to mind? If not, I can just
write MySQL/DB2 differences up as I encounter them

Would it be useful to link to the reference documentation for things like
CREATE TABLE, ALTER TABLE, ALTER COLUMN, etc in the short term?

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/db2luw/v9r7/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.db2.luw.sql.ref.doc/doc/r927.html

Regards,

Leons Petrazickis
http://lpetr.org/blog/
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[Wikitech-l] Regression suite? Was: Re: Database drivers

2010-09-07 Thread George Herbert
On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 12:19 PM, Aryeh Gregor
simetrical+wikil...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 2:44 PM, Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com wrote:
 Given those criteria, I think that the following have full support
 in MediaWiki:
 * MySQL
 * SQLite
 * PostgreSQL

 In practice, though, SQLite and PostgreSQL are more likely to break
 than MySQL, right?  If so, we should make this clear in the installer
 UI.  Or are they really about as well-supported as MySQL these days,
 minus a moderate lag in schema updates for pgsql?

 Ideally, we could run test suites by default on all available DBs
 instead of just on the one the wiki currently uses.  In particular,
 SQLite currently uses the same schema as MySQL and is available in PHP
 by default, plus it doesn't require any setup (providing admin login,
 etc.), so it would be great if we could run SQLite tests right now
 whenever people run tests.  It would be great if people could set up
 pgsql to automatically run too, but that would require manual setup.
 This is the kind of thing automated tests are really helpful for.
 (But that's kind of tangential.)

Out of curiosity - what regression test suites are in use to QA MW builds?

Thanks...


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herb...@gmail.com

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Database drivers

2010-09-07 Thread Chad
On Sun, Sep 5, 2010 at 10:56 PM, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote:
 It would be great if the maintainers of the less-commonly used DBMSes
 could write up development guides and put them in phase3/docs. These
 guides could describe relevant differences in SQL syntax compared to
 MySQL, and explain how to write schema files.


I got them started in r72533.

-Chad

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Selenium Framework - test run configuration data

2010-09-07 Thread Dan Nessett
On Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:39:19 +0200, Markus Glaser wrote:

 Hi all,
 
 I suggest we have one static class variable Selenium::$settings which is
 set up as an array. This array would be filled in some init function
 from whatever sources we decide on. Then, internally, the configuration
 mechanisms would not change anymore, and we could use the init method to
 fill the settings from globals (as is) or ini files (as Mark propses).
 Those who use the framework, however, would not have to rewrite their
 code.
 
 Regards,
 Markus
 
 Markus Glaser
 Social Web Technologien
 Leiter Softwareentwicklung
 Hallo Welt! - Medienwerkstatt GmbH
 __
 
 Untere Bachgasse 15
 93047 Regensburg
 
 Tel.   +49 (0) 941 - 56 95 94 92
 Fax.  +49 (0) 941 - 50 27 58 13
 
 
 www.hallowelt.biz
 gla...@hallowelt.biz
 
 Sitz: Regensburg
 Handelsregister: HRB 10467
 E.USt.Nr.: DE 253050833
 Geschäftsführer:
 Anja Ebersbach, Markus Glaser,
 Dr. Richard Heigl, Radovan Kubani
 
 
 -Ursprüngliche Nachricht-
 Von: wikitech-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org
 [mailto:wikitech-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] Im Auftrag von dan
 nessett Gesendet: Dienstag, 7. September 2010 17:20 An: Wikimedia
 developers; Mark A. Hershberger Betreff: Re: [Wikitech-l] Selenium
 Framework - test run configuration data
 
 I would be happy to coordinate with you. Up to this point I have been
 working with Markus Glaser and that has gone pretty well. But, I would
 welcome more discussion on issues, architecture and implementation
 strategy for the Framework as well as making sure anything I do fits in
 with what others are doing.
 
 Regards,
 
 Dan
 
 --- On Tue, 9/7/10, Mark A. Hershberger m...@everybody.org wrote:
 
 From: Mark A. Hershberger m...@everybody.org Subject: Re: Selenium
 Framework - test run configuration data To: Wikimedia developers
 wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Cc: Dan Nessett dness...@yahoo.com
 Date: Tuesday, September 7, 2010, 8:04 AM Dan Nessett
 dness...@yahoo.com
 writes:
 
  Either approach works. But, by going back and forth,
 it makes development
  of functionality for the Framework difficult.
 
 I should also point out that what I was planning to do was not hidden.
 I wrote about these changes in my weekly report the Monday before I
 committed them (http://bit.ly/cqAcqz) and pointed to the weekly report
 from my Ohloh, Twitter, Identi.ca and Facebook accounts.
 
 Granted, this is not the same as posting to the mailing list, and for
 that I apologize.
 
 Looking back in the archives on gmane, it looks like you are very
 interested in MW testing.  Since this is a large part of my focus
 currently as well, perhaps we should coordinate our work?
 
 Mark.
 
 --
 http://hexmode.com/
 
 Embrace Ignorance.  Just don't get too attached.
 
 
 
 
   
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This seems like a reasonable strategy to me.

Dan


-- 
-- Dan Nessett


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Re: [Wikitech-l] Community vs. centralized development

2010-09-07 Thread Robert Stojnic

 I made seven suggestions.  Only one was about actually dissolving the
 office, and I acknowledged that it might be extreme.  What about the
 others?  Why does the private IRC chat need to exist, for example?
 Why can't we have clear official statements that everything should be
 as public as possible and that volunteer developers should be treated
 as peers?  Why can't teleconferences be replaced by public-logged IRC
 chats?  Are these also too extreme?


Aryeh, I think many volunteer and more casual developers share your 
concern. I in principle agree with your proposals, although of course 
no-one can be forced to abandon private communication, and private means 
of communication are always going to exist. I have raised similar 
concerns about volunteers not knowing what is going on by not being on 
secret channels of communication, in person, to a couple of members of 
staff during last two wikimanias and developer meetings, and I had the 
feeling they agreed with me.

The community needs to be nurtured, and I think all new employees of the 
WMF need to be aware of it, and at first interview informed that they 
will *need* to interact with the community and with volunteer 
developers. I think many programmers who have worked in programming 
companies are too used to just talking and listening to their team 
leaders and no-one else. It should be made clear that this is not how 
things (should) work in WMF, and this should be an official position 
from however is hiring. Or maybe it is utopia and we do need to have a 
more stereotypical corporate setup, but I really hope not because 
wikipedia is fueled by enthusiasm.

Finally, speaking as a volunteer who is not on any secret IRC channels, 
mailing lists or payrolls I want to share my experience in WMF software 
development. Back in 2006 I wanted to make search better, and if then it 
wasn't for Tim Starling to give me shell access and a couple of test 
servers to play with, I think we would not have the new search, or at 
least not developed by me. An act of kindness, but also a sign that a 
core developer cares about what a relatively unknown volunteer is trying 
to do and achieve.

As for code review, I know the foundation knows how important this task 
is, and that it is no 9-5 job, but one that requires an extremely 
dedicated person with a great knowledge of the mediawiki codebase and 
ability to comment on virtually every programming issue. The foundation 
better pay this person well and not just hope for someone to fill in 
this place in their spare time.

Cheers, Robert



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Re: [Wikitech-l] Regression suite? Was: Re: Database drivers

2010-09-07 Thread Platonides
George Herbert wrote:
 Ideally, we could run test suites by default on all available DBs
 instead of just on the one the wiki currently uses.  In particular,
 SQLite currently uses the same schema as MySQL and is available in PHP
 by default, plus it doesn't require any setup (providing admin login,
 etc.), so it would be great if we could run SQLite tests right now
 whenever people run tests.  It would be great if people could set up
 pgsql to automatically run too, but that would require manual setup.
 This is the kind of thing automated tests are really helpful for.
 (But that's kind of tangential.)
 
 Out of curiosity - what regression test suites are in use to QA MW builds?
 
 Thanks...

We have the parser tests and a few phpunit tests.
There is also some support for Selenium tests.


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Re: [Wikitech-l] Incremental dumps on download

2010-09-07 Thread Platonides
Antoine Amarilli wrote:
 Hi all,
 
 I was wondering if there are any plans to provide incremental dumps (ie.
 the diff between each dump and the previous one) at
 download.wikimedia.org. It seems to me that such diffs would help save
 bandwidth because mirrors could stay up to date by downloading the diffs
 and applying them rather than downloading the whole dump each time.
 
 I am new here, so I hope that this mailing-list is the correct place for
 this kind of suggestions. If I am wrong, please tell me.
 
 Regards,

This mailing list is not bad, but you have a more specific one at
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/xmldatadumps-l

The idea is not bad, but we would probably need to roll out a custom
diff script to ensure it keeps memory usage low (that's not necessarily
hard). But if we were going to do that, we could as well provide the
differences in xml format instead for easy appliying. The result of
appliying a diff xml to an existing wiki is straghtforward, but what to
do with removed pages?


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Re: [Wikitech-l] fundraising earmarks for code review, image bundle dumps, search failover auction, Wikinews independence, bugzilla queue maintenance etc.

2010-09-07 Thread Bod Notbod
On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 5:05 PM, James Salsman jsals...@gmail.com wrote:

 Are there any reasons not to allow donors to earmark categories?

I feel an instinctive and passionate loathing for this proposal.
However, instinct and loathing are not very positive grounds on which
to argue a position, as I once tried to explain to a large bloke in a
pub as he repeatedly punched me in the face.

So I shall try to rein in my passions and argue with the logic of an automaton.

Firstly, such earmarking would turn a donation into a kind of
popularity vote. The populace decides what the priorities are. Voting
can be very good, we are all democratic now, but voters must be
informed citizens.

I believe the current percentage of Wikipedia visitors that edits
rather than stopping at just consuming the material is something like
0.01%. I would assume that the great majority of donors are readers of
articles and have never been anywhere near a mailing list like this
one, or looked at Meta-Wiki, or even visited our proposals pages, or
the strategy wiki, or really given much thought about the fact that a
Foundation runs Wikipedia. They may not even know it's a charity.

You are proposing that this unthinking and uninterested mass present
us with a few shakes of the Magic 8 Ball that the WMF will then feel
bound by?

Secondly, you state that perhaps 30 options for earmarking could be
presented to a potential donor, when I believe it's been shown that
users interact with things at a proportion inverse to the number of
options; the donation interface should be as clean and unintimidating
as possible or we are in danger of alienating people right on the cusp
of acting as we would hope and wish.

Finally, we've just had an extensive Strategy process and the
community was involved. Regardless of what you think of the outcomes
(for me, I was disappointed that what came out was painted in broader
strokes than I had imagined and would have liked), if we were to now
say actually, forget all that. Forget Strategy happened. Let's direct
our energies according to the flighty whims of someone who'd never
asked themselves a pertinent question until seeing a humungous list of
radio buttons pop up on their screen and clicked one of the first four
cos it sounded like a good thing and four is the limit of their
Twitterised attention span.

The Strategy Process was the community's way of influencing
priorities. Those priorities will need to be funded by the donations.
This ship has sailed.

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Community vs. centralized development

2010-09-07 Thread Neil Kandalgaonkar
On 9/7/10 4:15 PM, Robert Stojnic wrote:

 The community needs to be nurtured, and I think all new employees of the
 WMF need to be aware of it, and at first interview informed that they
 will *need* to interact with the community and with volunteer
 developers.

Just FYI, this was the most-stressed topic during my interviews at the 
WMF. So I don't think it's a matter of the WMF not being aware of the topic.


  I think many programmers who have worked in programming
 companies are too used to just talking and listening to their team
 leaders and no-one else.

This is true, but we are trying not to hire this sort of person.

Off the top of my head I would guess at least 75% of the developers here 
had significant open source experience before being hired, many with 
Wikimedia projects.

-- 
Neil Kandalgaonkar ne...@wikimedia.org

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Community vs. centralized development

2010-09-07 Thread Ryan Kaldari
I am both a long-time community member and a new WMF paid developer (in 
the SF office) so I think I'm in a unique position to clear up some 
misconceptions.

First of all, all this talk of secret listservs and IRC channels is 
malarkey. Yes, there are private listservs and IRC channels. All of them 
are private for very specific and well-established reasons. Most of them 
are only used in very specific circumstances (for example if there was a 
security breach that needed to be discussed privately) and tend to be 
very low traffic. They are not the places where important decisions are 
made.

Secondly, the idea that developers here in the office don't interact 
with the community is absurd. The developers here interact with the 
community constantly. We discuss community opinion and ideas, we talk 
with community members all day long on IRC, listservs, and on-wiki. I'm 
amazed that the developers here ever get anything done considering how 
much time they spend documenting what they are working on and 
interacting with the community about it. The problem is they can't 
interact with everyone everywhere: Code Review, IRC, listservs, the Tech 
Blog, meta, Signpost, etc. So no matter what, someone is going to feel 
like they are out of the loop.

The WMF is extremely interested in new developers interacting with the 
community, indeed they try to hire developers from within the community 
when possible. The notion that the foundation is hiring corporate drones 
who are only going to listen to their task masters is completely 
unfounded. Yes, there have been situations where the foundation has been 
given grant money for very specifically defined projects and those 
projects have been implemented without adequate community involvement. 
Everyone (including the foundation) knows that that's not how we want to 
do development in the future. As has been discussed throughout the past 
year, the foundation wants to move away from accepting any money with 
strings attached and away from relying on grants in general. Hopefully, 
if this year's fundraiser goes well, we won't have to worry about these 
issues in the future.

Ryan Kaldari

On 9/7/10 4:15 PM, Robert Stojnic wrote:
 I made seven suggestions.  Only one was about actually dissolving the
 office, and I acknowledged that it might be extreme.  What about the
 others?  Why does the private IRC chat need to exist, for example?
 Why can't we have clear official statements that everything should be
 as public as possible and that volunteer developers should be treated
 as peers?  Why can't teleconferences be replaced by public-logged IRC
 chats?  Are these also too extreme?

  
 Aryeh, I think many volunteer and more casual developers share your
 concern. I in principle agree with your proposals, although of course
 no-one can be forced to abandon private communication, and private means
 of communication are always going to exist. I have raised similar
 concerns about volunteers not knowing what is going on by not being on
 secret channels of communication, in person, to a couple of members of
 staff during last two wikimanias and developer meetings, and I had the
 feeling they agreed with me.

 The community needs to be nurtured, and I think all new employees of the
 WMF need to be aware of it, and at first interview informed that they
 will *need* to interact with the community and with volunteer
 developers. I think many programmers who have worked in programming
 companies are too used to just talking and listening to their team
 leaders and no-one else. It should be made clear that this is not how
 things (should) work in WMF, and this should be an official position
 from however is hiring. Or maybe it is utopia and we do need to have a
 more stereotypical corporate setup, but I really hope not because
 wikipedia is fueled by enthusiasm.

 Finally, speaking as a volunteer who is not on any secret IRC channels,
 mailing lists or payrolls I want to share my experience in WMF software
 development. Back in 2006 I wanted to make search better, and if then it
 wasn't for Tim Starling to give me shell access and a couple of test
 servers to play with, I think we would not have the new search, or at
 least not developed by me. An act of kindness, but also a sign that a
 core developer cares about what a relatively unknown volunteer is trying
 to do and achieve.

 As for code review, I know the foundation knows how important this task
 is, and that it is no 9-5 job, but one that requires an extremely
 dedicated person with a great knowledge of the mediawiki codebase and
 ability to comment on virtually every programming issue. The foundation
 better pay this person well and not just hope for someone to fill in
 this place in their spare time.

 Cheers, Robert



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