I have Visual Editor and for some reason it generates "dirty diffs" when saving pages on unrelated changes. For example, a user may edit only a single paragraph, but VE removes all "non-significant" white space from tables, headings and lists, in all the page that hasn't been touched.
See this diff as an example.
I though the problem was that I didn't update Parsoid since the last MediaWiki upgrade, but that's not true, because I'm using the latest version available on Debian: 0.10.0all
Weird. Can you reproduce this on a smaller, simpler page? (The point is to see that it happens on a page that you know doesn't contain any unusual wikitext or HTML.)
Yes, try this test page. You can change something on the first paragraph and see the resulting diff on preview
Just to give more information, I also have RESTBase installed
Special:Version says that your version is a couple of months older than the most recent... but I'm not sure that's the problem. I think that if there had been whitespace changes like that across all the wikis, that someone would have been complaining.
@Cscott, do you have any thoughts about what to check?
It sounds like "selective serialization" isn't enabled, which is the feature which specifically prevents dirty diffs. I think RESTBase is required to enable selective serialization, so that may be the first thing to check.
I have RESTBase installed. Is there anything I can do to debug if selective serialization is not working or failing? logs? network traffic between RESTBase and Parsoid?
I only had to uncomment this line from config.yaml:
# Use selective serialization (default false) useSelser: true
Too bad nobody here was able to suggest such a simple change (and zero documentation about it!) </rant>
