I created a bug around killing this hook in favour of more specific clearer hooks - https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58137 - I don't think we should be tinkering with template variables personally under any circumstances and if we are making changes we should be doing them higher up the stack. I would be interested in your thoughts and inevitable screams about how I'm proposing terrible things ;-)
On Fri, Dec 6, 2013 at 10:37 AM, Jon Robson <jdlrob...@gmail.com> wrote: > The mobile skin has traditionally used the template variable > 'language_urls' in SkinTemplate to access the list of alternative > languages of an article. We are now seeing a lot of friction and bugs > as we try to move our codebase closer to core. > > Question 1: > What does 'language_urls' mean - is it acceptable for anything other > than a real language to be in that list? > > Over the course of 3 weeks however we have had 3 bugs that have added > things that are not languages to this list. This has caused various > noticeable problems with how languages works on mobile. > > Question 2: > Why do developers abuse it in this way - is there not a better more > semantic way to do this? > > Currently we have an issue live on all wikipedias which makes a > language button show up on all pages - even those without articles. > x > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Diggers_%26_Dealers&title=Diggers_%26_Dealers > When the language button at the bottom of the screen is clicked it > says "This page is available in 1 language: Edit links (Edit > interlanguage links) > > As a result I've now proposed a change for our skin to override this > [1] so that we can control the list contents and override the effects > of the hook. > > This however is rather frustrating - especially given none of our > template variables are documented and open to this kind of > interpretation > > Question 3: > Should we document these template variables? If so where and how? > > Thanks for your opinions on this matter. > > [1] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/99693 > > -- > Jon Robson > http://jonrobson.me.uk > @rakugojon -- Jon Robson http://jonrobson.me.uk @rakugojon _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
