Petr: My sympathies on the frustration. First I'm going to talk about the problem in general, then about your issue.
Yes, the Wikimedia community is too slow to review contributions in general. The experienced developers who could do code review include many people who don't work for the Wikimedia Foundation, but many of them don't review patches or extensions, because they prefer to write code or don't have time for MediaWiki at all. Reviewing code is hard and tedious. It requires more skill than writing code does, more knowledge of MediaWiki internals and of Wikimedia site architecture, and most developers just don't think they're skilled enough to do it. Things we're doing to try to fix this: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_review_management As Tim mentioned, WMF engineers are supposed to spend about 20% of their work time on tasks that serve the Wikimedia community, such as review of volunteers' contributions. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_20%25_policy has the details. For the past several months, the most urgent need has been reviewing individual revisions submitted through the source control system, to get that backlog down so we could deploy 1.19. We have indeed done that. Rob Lanphier leads prioritization of 20% time so I'll wait for his input on whether it's feasible to switch priorities to extension review. The trade-off is that this would lead to an increase in our general Gerrit backlog and probably an increase in the number of patches in Bugzilla awaiting review (currently 177 for MediaWiki core + WMF-deployed extensions). As Bugmeister, Mark Hershberger has been championing the review and deployment of extensions in the review queue, such as the ShortURL extension, but of course hasn't had time to concentrate on that recently, given the urgent demands of the incoming bugs and of the MediaWiki 1.19 deployment and release. I reach out personally to ask experienced MediaWiki developers to review patches that have been submitted in Bugzilla. This has mixed results and costs so much time (for me) per patch that it simply can't scale up to the 150+ patches awaiting review. To address this, Mark is working on turning every patch in Bugzilla into a branch that gets submitted into Gerrit. That way automated tests will get run against those patches (to reduce the amount of work human reviewers have to do), and they'll be in the usual code review workflow. To teach and encourage developers to do more code review and extension review, we have led two code review trainings https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_review_management/Aug_2011_training and https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_review_management/July_2011_training and improved our code review documents https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_review_guide . I also personally reach out to strong developers to ask them if they'd like to be mentored to improve their code review skills. I don't know whether these have been effective. Maybe this thread will awaken a desire among other developers to help out by taking a look at these extensions and giving useful criticism. Now, about your situation specifically: In the extension review queue https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Review_queue I see one extension that's labeled (on its extension page) as authored by you, OnlineStatusBar. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:OnlineStatusBar When I look at the bug that's tracking its review, https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32128 , I see that Timo wants to review the extension thoroughly but hasn't yet; I'll poke him about that. What's the other extension? You mentioned that there should be better guidelines. I think https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Writing_an_extension_for_deployment is fairly comprehensive about the process except that it doesn't give any guidelines regarding time. Where were you looking for information about this process? Go ahead and link to this document there. -- Sumana Harihareswara Volunteer Development Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
