Re: future of the mediawiki extension?

From: Matthieu Moy <git@matthieu-moy.fr>
Date: Oct 30, 2017, 10:29 UTC
Message-ID: <q7h9o9opyllo.fsf@orange.lip.ens-lyon.fr>
In-Reply-To: <87vaix731f.fsf@curie.anarc.at>

[ Please Cc: me in these discussions ]

Antoine Beaupré <anarcat@debian.org> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

> I think, however, it would be good to have a discussion about the future
> of that extension in Git. The extension has a bit of a hybrid presence -
> it is partly in git core (as a contrib, but still) and partly on GitHub
> here:
>
> https://github.com/Git-Mediawiki/Git-Mediawiki/

The initial plan was to use Git's contrib/ subdirectory to get more of the Git community involved in its development, and avoid making it a personal toy.

Initially, Git-Mediawiki is both a personnal project and a student's project (most of the code was written by students as part of an Ensimag project under my supervision, with strong interaction with the Git community).

It did work well in the first times of the project, there were very fruitfull interactions between Git-Mediawiki and Git. Some issues raised while developing Git-Mediawiki led to improvements in the remote-helper mechanism in Git. Some code written for Git-Mediawiki ended up in Git (the Perl layer for the credential helpers at least). I think this would have been harder if Git-Mediawiki was a separte project.

However, the rest of the plan did not work that well. I thought having the code in contrib/ would help keeping the project alive if I became inactive. It's been a while I didn't have enough time-budget to work on the project, and the git.git review mechanism has actually blocked a lot of contributors. Patches get posted here and there but no one takes time for a proper submission here, and when this happens contributors give up after the first round of review instead of re-rolling.

So, my conclusion is that a simpler submission mechanism (GitHub's pull-requests) and a less picky code review would help Git-Mediawiki.

From previous discussions, I think Junio will agree with that: he's reluctant to keeping too much stuff in contrib/ and usally prefers external projects.

> It should also be mentioned that this contrib isn't very active: I'm not
> part of the GitHub organization, yet I'm probably the one that's been
> the most active with patches in the last year (and I wasn't very active
> at all).

FYI, I'm no longer using Mediawiki as much as I did, and I don't really use Git-Mediawiki anymore.

The main blocking point to revive Git-Mediawiki is to find a new maintainer (https://github.com/Git-Mediawiki/Git-Mediawiki/issues/33). I believe I just found one ;-).

> Please avoid "mailing list vs GitHub" flamewars and keep to the topic of
> this specific contrib's future. :)

Note that being a separate project doesn't mean there can't be any interaction with this list. Requests for reviews for separate projects are usually welcome even though they don't happen often here.

There's also a hybrid solution used by git-multimail: have a copy of the code in git.git, but do the development separately. I'm not sure it'd be a good idea for Git-Mediawiki, but I'm mentionning it for completeness.

Regards,

-- 
Matthieu Moy
https://matthieu-moy.fr/