A fundamental principle of medicine is "do no harm." It has a long history and
you can find it in the Hippocratic oath with a slightly different wording.
This is also an important principle of software development. If you add a new
feature or fix a bug, make sure the resulting code isn't worse off than before.
Do no harm is the basic motivation behind regression testing.
I have been thinking about Brion's suggestion of fixing the bug in
WebRequest::extractTitle(). It is a reasonable point. Don't just whine about a
problem. Fix it. He even provided the best strategy for accomplishing this.
Make "sure $wgScriptPath gets properly escaped when initialized." I am sure
doing this would not require a significant amount of coding. But, how would
changing the way $wgScriptPath is formatted affect the rest of the code base?
I decided to do a multi-file search for $wgScriptPath in phase3 and extensions
[r53650]. There are 439 references to it in phase3 and extensions combined. In
phase3 alone, there are 47 references. Roughly 1/3 of these are in global
declarations, so phase3 has about 30 "active" references and in phase3 and
extensions combined there are roughly 300. [By "active" I mean references in
which the value of $wgScriptPath affects the code's logic.]
So, if I were to change the formatting of $wgScriptPath, there potentially are
30 places in the main code and 300 places in extensions where problems might
occur. To ensure the change does no harm, I would have to observe the effect of
the change on at least 30 and up to 330 places in the distribution. This is
pretty onerous requirement. My guess is very few developers would take the time
to do it.
On the other hand, if there were regression tests for the main code and for the
most important extensions, I could make the change, run the regression tests
and see if any break. If some do, I could focus my attention on those problems.
I would not have to find every place the global is referenced and see if the
change adversely affects the logic.
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