Snaterlicious added subscribers: daniel, Snaterlicious. Snaterlicious added a comment.
As the reasons for making the decision and the decision itself to split the repositories were not documented properly (in the sense of not at all), this matter is doomed to reappear again and again. I remember parts of the discussion which happend quite a while ago (like about two years) just as I remember @daniel and me having objections against moving components to GitHub. While it seems like we need to rewind all arguments, an outcome should be a clear and documented statement by Product Management. I think a particular pain point is the wide-spread and branched-out modularization. I smell the hope that, by moving all components to one place, the software and its internal relations would be more understandable. Just by moving the components that problem will not be solved though. The current situation is a modularization mess resulting in de facto closed source as no one is able to grasp the relations between all components without tackling a ridiculously steep learning curve. I have created a diagram trying to capture the PHP data model component on https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T75604 -- imagine that a dozen of times for all the components. While documentation could, at least, ease the problem, the reality is missing and outdated documentation just adding to the problem with the way up the hill being paved with disappointment as quite some modules are just not as generically useful as one would expect and/or they lack stability. Additionally, even the most basic component, the data model, is still under dispute. Another example is the Time value which is embarrassingly broken. Why would some external developer want to jump into that wavy sea at all? Well, maybe the software is indeed doing complex things and it seems like the amount of complexity is barely manageable by the core developers alone. As far as I am concerned, the move to GitHub was actually driven by the idea to open up to developers from outside the MediaWiki context as the amount of potential developers who could easily reuse these compontens, is higher on GitHub than on Gerrit. While the idea is totally legitimate, until now, that has failed in all matters. I am sure the intendend effect of having components being on GitHub can be generated but, in my opinion, not with the current component design. (e.g.: Why is there no independent generic coordinate or time parsing library that I could just dump into my project?) At the bottom line, as I see it, either we just give up on the idea of GitHub being the portal to more contributors and attractive reuse of individual components or we considerably rethink the component design which -- in my opinion -- is the actual problem anyway. TASK DETAIL https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T74907 REPLY HANDLER ACTIONS Reply to comment or attach files, or !close, !claim, !unsubscribe or !assign <username>. EMAIL PREFERENCES https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/settings/panel/emailpreferences/ To: Snaterlicious Cc: Snaterlicious, daniel, adrianheine, Tobi_WMDE_SW, GPHemsley, Legoktm, JeroenDeDauw, JanZerebecki, aude, Glaisher, MZMcBride, Lydia_Pintscher, Dereckson, hoo, Wikidata-bugs, Jdouglas _______________________________________________ Wikidata-bugs mailing list Wikidata-bugs@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-bugs
