On 12/2/2010 2:48 PM, Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote:
> Like, there's a thread over on Commons Village Pump right now about how
> to change certain strings that are hardcoded into the upload process.
> Apparently this kind of bug lasts for years rather than five minutes,
> just because the people who are most exercised about it don't have PHP
> skills or don't have commit access.
I've done my time in maintainance programming hell. I've hacked on
code by McArthur "geniuses" and some of the greatest computer scientists
of our time. I've also had to clean up the messes left behind by people
who should never be allowed anywhere near a computer.
Of all the code I've seen, the Mediawiki code seems to be one of
the most difficult code bases to make simple changes in. When I had to
change the template of a mediawiki once, the easiest answer I found was
to put a proxy server in front of it, drop out the original template
and spit the body text into a new template. (That said, this was a
system I already had on the shelf that worked wonders for all sorts of
commercial crapware)
That said, I spent a good deal of time this summer building an IX
system that parses mediawiki markup and if I had to do it all again I
would have braved the guantlet and embeded Mediawiki in it, because you
can get closer to 100% correct processing of templates that way than you
can by writing a recursive descent parsers and thousands of rules...
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