Need to document better as it had many pros and cons
Code: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/PWBO/browse/master/externals/__init__.py
Pros:
Cons:
References:
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Invalid | None | T72936 Important tasks to be solved (tracking) | |||
| Open | Feature | None | T57880 Functionality existing in compat but missing from core (tracking) | ||
| Declined | None | T66838 Port catimages.py to core | |||
| Resolved | AbdealiJK | T129611 [GSoC 2016 Proposal] Port catimages.py to pywikibot-core | |||
| Resolved | 01tonythomas | T134721 Weekly reports of GSoC 2016 projects (tracking) | |||
| Resolved | AbdealiJK | T133762 [GSoC requirement] Weekly Reports for Port catimages.py to pywikibot-core | |||
| Resolved | None | T135835 Meeting about handling non-pip packages / replace externals module | |||
| Declined | None | T138140 Document history & capability of externals |
Agree, actually was an amazing piece of code I was proud of. However I never saw too many cons, since it was opt-in: no pywikibot developper had to use it...
What do you need? A describtion of how it worked? More references?
Mostly what I needed was any history which isnt in the git repo.
I had assumed from what you had said earlier that the design of externals/ had been modeled on VisTrails, but it now seems that the inspiration from VisTrails was only the concept of "vendored" dependencies. Surprisingly this concept doesnt have a English Wikipedia article, but it is a common pattern, especially in Ruby and Javascript Node and recently PHP with Composer, but hasnt yet made its way into Python in a formalised manner afaik (and in fact is not easy to do right in Python as it requires fiddling with PYTHONPATH (e.g. pwb.py) or relative imports in the vendored package; see here and there).
If externals/ didnt borrow any design or code from elsewhere, then the git history is sufficient to explain the history of it.
Anything you can add about its functionality would be very helpful.
That said, I am pretty familiar with externals/, and I can wax lyrical about the cons as I was maintaining the httplib2 forked into externals (and fixing it), and I was responsible for killing it in core. vendoring is hard to do right in Python, especially if Pywikibot is a library used by a program that also wants to use one of the vendored dependencies - the result is typically two copies of the library, or the program is forced to used the vendored version, which may be chronically out of date, and may even have unpatched security vulnerabilities.