User:MZMcBride/Bugs

Bugs!

Philosophy
Occasionally a user finds a bug while using some Wikimedia-related product or project. Sometimes it's in MediaWiki, sometimes it's in a MediaWiki extension, sometimes it's somewhere else entirely. Rather than sitting quietly and not telling anyone about the bug, these users will sometimes take the time to report it in the appropriate venue, Bugzilla. And then it sits. Sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for a few years. Sometimes commented on and poked and prodded, sometimes left completely quiet. This can be a very frustrating experience for users and most of them simply forget about the bugs and move on.

Bugs are ideas. They're ideas about how software should work. People should take great caution when marking bugs as resolved to avoid killing good ideas.

The cost of the noise switching back and forth between bug and enhancement far outweighs any benefit. Nearly every bug filer doesn't care what you call a particular ticket. Bug filers are concerned with seeing the underlying issue properly resolved.

Style
Bug summaries should be short and descriptive. They should include the component name, particularly if the bug involves a MediaWiki extension. A bug summary such as "Contact form doesn't work" is far less useful than a bug summary such as "MobileFrontend's contact form doesn't work". Oftentimes the bugs will be reported (in IRC channels, in e-mail, etc.) by referencing the bug's ID and bug summary, not including the stored component name. This makes it very important that the bug summary be as useful as possible.

Bugs bugs bugs
This section is an attempt to list some of the oldest bugs in Bugzilla in a more sensible format than obscure Bugzilla queries. It's unclear what the best format to accomplish this goal is, so a few different formats may be tested and tried.

Development

 * 1999 &mdash; add MediaWiki: footer message
 * 2679 &mdash; put category links above edit window when previewing
 * 3185 &mdash; Page move rollback should not leave a redirect
 * 3753 &mdash; Option to hide rows from Special:Contributions where the edit is the most recent to a page
 * 4127 &mdash; Token to suppress table of contents autonumbering
 * 4469 &mdash; Provide per-namespace site notices
 * 5984 &mdash; Edit preview doesn't let you preview cite.php footnotes.
 * 6069 &mdash; Different message for talk page edits
 * 12681 &mdash; moving new messages bar out of content area

Extensions

 * 27699 &mdash; Review and deploy TimedMediaHandler extension (timed media handler) to Wikimedia wikis
 * 22215 &mdash; Review SignWriting MediaWiki Plugin extension code and commit it to SVN
 * 37992 &mdash; Review and deploy Drafts extension to Wikimedia wikis
 * 35144 &mdash; Autolink to new Gerrit / Git changesets and SHA-1 commits

Well,

 * 27311 &mdash; Add a "create a page" interface to MediaWiki core
 * 40346 &mdash; Convert some MediaWiki user preferences into JavaScript gadgets (tracking)
 * 33886 &mdash; to support for microdata and rdfa, allow &lt;a&gt; tags so external links can have ref/rel attributes

BHAGs
All of these should probably have bugs.


 * w:Wikipedia:Dump reports &mdash; regexing wikitext
 * Laxative


 * Search
 * Lucene search code is abandoned and needs love
 * Written in Java
 * Mailing lists search doesn't exist
 * Especially problematic for private lists
 * Image search on Commons is terrible
 * Search by color
 * Search by size
 * Search by keyword
 * Search by shape?
 * Search by penis size, color, veininess, etc.


 * Configuration
 * Configuration user interface for MediaWiki
 * Also has to support Wikimedia wikis (oh God)


 * Global message delivery extension
 * Current implementation is a simple Python script and love/prayer


 * Write a proper Wikimedia Shop
 * Localization!
 * Flexible galleries
 * Use a wiki; tie into payments.wikimedia.org


 * Rewrite mailman?
 * God it's so awful. The entire FLOSS community would thank you...


 * Queued user renames
 * User deletion/deactivation process
 * Related to both: abstractify the MediaWiki database; stop storing username everywhere


 * Focus on non-Wikipedias (oh God)

Queries

 * All open bugs in ascending order by bug number
 * All open bugs marked "easy"