Currently, our app CSS stylesheets are generated from sources in at least three different places:
- MobileFrontend;
- the MobileApp extension; and
- I believe the iOS app has some .less files living in its repo.
On Android we update our bundled CSS by firing up and updating mw-vagrant and manually running a shell script[1] as often as someone thinks to do it. I'm not sure what the update strategy is for the iOS app. The styles in the MobileApp extension don't get a lot of attention, and we're not really frontend web devs.
I believe it would improve cross-mobile-platform consistency and communication to keep all of our CSS styling code in one place. I propose that that place be MobileFrontend, since we're all ultimately dependent on it. I suspect that having the app(s)-specific code in the same repo would help the mobile web devs anticipate possible effects of changes on mobile apps and encourage discussion about upcoming changes. Consolidation could also work hand-in-hand with incorporating the kind of unit testing that Joaquin mentioned in the recent email thread about the iOS srcset regression.
What do you think?
[1] https://git.wikimedia.org/blob/apps%2Fandroid%2Fwikipedia.git/master/scripts%2Fmake-css-assets.bash