Regarding "everyone loves JSON these days": I truly, deeply, hate it.
On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 2:40 PM, Andrew Garrett <[email protected]> wrote: > Hey folks, > > I'd to modestly propose that we talk about managing/announcing breaking > changes to core MediaWiki architecture. > > I want to have this chat because I spent an hour or two yesterday trying to > figure out why changing default configuration options for an extension in > MyExtension.php wasn't working. Apparently, now, you also have to change it > in extension.json for it to work on Vagrant. > > I understand that this was a change that was announced on wikitech-l, but I > don't think that I'm the only one who thinks that reading wikitech-l isn't > a good use of time, compared to, say, doing my job (irony upon ironies, I > know). If you want to change the way that things have worked for 11 years, > then making engineers understand what they need to do differently is your > responsibility, not mine. > > So, besides huffing and puffing, I have two small proposals: > > 1. We should have a low-volume list/RSS feed/twitter account/something > where we announce major breaking changes like this, that doesn't involve > reading 20 emails per day of other stuff that doesn't affect the way I do > my job. > > 2. If we make breaking changes, the change should be really obvious so that > I can't spend hours trying to find out what changed. > > For example, when we did the i18n JSON migration (everybody seems to love > JSON these days), and I went to change/add a message, I found that the > message file was a completely different format, and I was clued in straight > away to the fact that something was different. > > By contrast, in this case, the way I'd done things for years suddenly > stopped working. I've heard it justified in this particular case that this > is just a transition period; but it's not just a transition period for > code, it's a transition period for practices, and therefore it's the time > when it should be the LEAST confusing for engineers who don't care about > your refactoring, not the MOST confusing. > > > — Andrew Garrett > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
