Due to the growing number of problems (T185664) and the difficulty of fixing them, I think it is worth starting to think about replacing this extension with a new one with the support of the WMF, something like FlaggedRevs 2.0.
For now more than 45 Wikimedia projects use this extension.
I fear that this is rather seriously missing the point. There is no sponsor for keeping FlaggedRevs in Wikimedia production now. Why would making a new extension magically create one?
@Jdforrester-WMF Why WMF is not able to fund developing FlaggedRevs (or replacement)?
FlaggedRevs would need substantial money to keep up with current backlog, but it still widely used extension and communities generally tends to think it is useful.
Regardless of the Code Stewardship Review team's decision, we have only two ways to maintain the current functionality in the future: refactoring the current code, or writing a new one. It seems to me that refactoring will be many times more labor intensive and less stable than writing new code in the future. We need to think about it now, until the new MediaWiki update broke it completely someday :)
It's matter of priorities. The current priority on wmf is projects mentioned in the mid-term plan or 2030 strategy. For example, building the paid API. Whether we agree or not, that's decided already.
I agree with James, we don't have engineering resources to keep it running, how on earth we can find resources to build a completely new one from scratch?
That misses the point. There's a detailed reasoning on why you should not rewrite things unless absolutely necessary in refactoring book by Martin Fowler. Usually, it's a vicious cycle. And this is not one of those cases that we should. I have done some work on this extension before. The problem it includes lots of code that is not enabled in production at all and we can rather easily just remove code from it to make it easier to maintain.
This is a long-term task that will allow you to understand and track the main points of development of the gadget. And it will help to build some kind of support plan in the future.
I may have incorrectly described the task, but in any case, something needs to be done with the ext. And when resources are found, it is desirable that there is already some kind of development plan. If you say refactoring is more likely, then we just need to rename the task :)
If somebody is fast enough, then there is still time to drop application to this years software/research project grants. Deadline is today 16.3.2021.
I don't see anything in this task that helps "understand and track" anything or "build some kind of support plan". All that information should exist in dedicated open tasks under FlaggedRevs if you want to improve/fix functionality and maintenance of the FlaggedRevs codebase (as you explicitly mention FlaggedRevs in the task title). Wikimedia does not need more unrealistic vague "long-term tasks" without clear resourcing. Of course anyone is free to reimplement anything in open source projects. If you plan to do that implementation work, feel free to follow https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Writing_an_extension_for_deployment . Thanks.
I may have incorrectly described the task, but in any case, something needs to be done with the ext.
As written before, that is T185664 is already about.