Hi Jack, All good points. Let me see if I can summarize a bit and then address a few of these ...
1. Releasing code back to Wikimedia's SVN Guilty as charged. We haven't contributed back as much as we should have (or even as much as we wanted to). The issue really isn't that we're afraid... there are two specific reasons, neither of which are defensible, but are the actual reasons nonetheless. - the first is the amount of time to prepare the documentation, make sure the extension installs cleanly, and possibly rewrite the extension to take out any Wikia-specific code (like dependencies on YUI, etc.). - the second (and larger) reason is the priority of spending that time back-submitting code versus working on the long list of other stuff we want to do that might better grow the site. The solution to both of the points above is a public SVN repository where our code is available the minute it's written. As you know, this one in particular has been of high interest to me for a long time. Please read below for more on that. 2. Public Wikia SVN Again, guilty as charged. However, not quite as guilty as with #1. The issue here, again, is priority. There will be an investment of time needed from engineering to support this and support questions from developers ongoing. That means we'll need to devote some people to this who would otherwise have been working directly on fixing community reported bugs and issues. The good news is that we're just about ready with it. It's an effort that started some months ago after I wrote to you and several others. Artur and Emil should be announcing something within 1 week. We're also working on a public bug tracking system that will follow as well. The server and code repository are ready, Artur's just been working on authentication for submissions and then it will be ready for release. Now... having said all that, there are things we do submit to Wikimedia that didn't make your list. For instance, we've submitted patches to squid cache code to improve hit ratios. Also, a project we've been working on for months is transitioning from Squid cache servers to Varnish cache servers. The difference is significant (varnish looks to be about 10x better on a lot of fronts)... but we've had to write code to support invalidations the way MediaWiki expects. This could save Wikimedia a lot of money on servers and we've been talking to them as we do these tests. So... point taken. We think having the public SVN repository will address a lot of this. Thanks, John Q.
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