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Formalise documentation about extensions hosted in Gerrit not being WMF responsibility
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Description

There's many extensions hosted in Gerrit by Wikimedia that Wikimedia don't maintain or "care" about. Often, but not always, people update these extensions whilst they're updating Wikimedia extensions. This is extra maintenance burden, when we don't have spare time or capacity.

We use this as our benchmark for "removal" after deprecation purpose (can we remove this from core? is it used anywhere). Should we be doing this?

Long deprecated code sits around in core, because of unmaintained extensions still using it. If no one else cares about it, why should we? Why should this be a blocker to removing things from core?

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Long deprecated code sits around in core, because of unmaintained extensions still using it. If no one else cares about it, why should we? Why should this be a blocker to removing things from core?

@Reedy: Do you have a past example for this that you could link to?

Long deprecated code sits around in core, because of unmaintained extensions still using it. If no one else cares about it, why should we? Why should this be a blocker to removing things from core?

@Reedy: Do you have a past example for this that you could link to?

Not offhand, but with some time to dig around, but shouldn't be too hard to find (except, archived extensions are probably harder to "browse" by default

The perfect example would be something that we got the GCI students to help clean up, and the extension was then archived at a later date...

Vvjjkkii renamed this task from Formalise documentation about extensions hosted in Gerrit not being WMF responsibility to c5baaaaaaa.Jul 1 2018, 1:07 AM
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CommunityTechBot renamed this task from c5baaaaaaa to Formalise documentation about extensions hosted in Gerrit not being WMF responsibility.Jul 2 2018, 3:33 PM
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@Reedy: Before anyone could "formalize documentation", you'd first have to define criteria which allow identifying code repos in Gerrit that might be unmaintained? And then throw them over to Projects-Cleanup.
That might be a chicken-and-egg problem as people continue fixing code that might be unmaintained, so there is activity which looks like maintenance.
Was wondering if there might be other criteria, like created REL1_3x branches but I guess some extensions have a "keep master compatible" development policy.

You could go to https://wikimedia.biterg.io/app/kibana#/dashboard/Git , set the time frame in the upper right corner, scroll down to the "Repositories" widget, sort by the "Authors" and/or "Commits" column. (However that's limited to listing 50 repos in that bucket if you're not an admin.) But no idea which criteria you want to apply?

Or run some script after cloning all repos locally to see how many authors (hmm, committers maybe better?) there are (though covers only master, no branches):

#!/bin/bash
# This code is licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode
DEADLINE="2016-12-15"
for i in $( ls ); do
  if [ -d $i ]; then
    cd $i
      echo ": ====" $i
      if [ -f ".git" ] || [ -d ".git" ]; then
       # Print number of different authors (not committers):
        git log --after=$DEADLINE --author='' --pretty=format:"%ae" | sort | uniq -c > tmp.txt
        sed '/jenkins-bot\@gerrit\.wikimedia\.org/d;/l10n-bot\@translatewiki\.net/d;/libraryupgrader\@tools\.wmflabs\.org/d' -i tmp.txt
        cat tmp.txt | wc -l
        rm tmp.txt
        sleep 2
      fi
    cd ..
  fi
done

I don't think there is anything actionable in this ticket, and this has been superseded by https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Stable_interface_policy#Deprecation_process ?

No reply; closing