On 20 November 2012 19:53, Faidon Liambotis <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 05:19:51PM -0800, James Forrester wrote: > > In WMF Engineering, we've been struggling with what we mean by 'supporting' > > browsers, and how we can match limited developer time to our natural desire > > to make everyone happy. > > <snip> > > So, to turn this mass of text into an 'ask', I would love the thoughts of > > this list about this. Do you think this might work? Is "making sure all the > > different parts of MediaWiki keep working with <browser I love>" something > > you'd see yourself volunteering to do? > > So, I think you're intermixing two different things: MediaWiki support > and "WMF Engineering" or "cluster" browser support.
I disagree. I switched from talking about WMF Engineering to asking whether third parties, enthusiasts and volunteers would want to take on wider MediaWiki support because an effect of our suggested policy is that WMF's involvement in MediaWiki support for browsers not on "our list" will reduce. This does not mean I think the two things are the same; I would love MediaWiki to work perfectly with a wider range of user agents than WMF has the resources to support. [Snip] > For example, browsers make a huge difference in the SSL features they > support. So, we currently don't do SNI, as it's unsupported on certain > browser/platforms¹ (mainly: Windows XP and Android < 3). Other SSL > features (e.g. RFC 5077) are in a similar state, and I guess we can > think of other such features not exclusive to MediaWiki. > > Should this policy be expanded to cover such cases too? I think so. We > should definitely put more effort though and expand your use cases to > ops use cases too. Yes, this policy would cover all of WMF Engineering; sorry for not picking an area in Ops as one of my two examples. :-) In this particular case, it might well be that you (or someone else in Ops) at some point makes the call that using SNI is more important than supporting users with Windows XP (though probably not whilst they're 21%(!) of our users). I'd expect you to highlight this change in support to the wider community rather than just breaking it by switching over, but that is what the framework is for - making a decision and justifying it. :-) J. -- James D. Forrester Product Manager, VisualEditor Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. [email protected] | @jdforrester _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
