ContentTranslation dependencies are not clearly defined in the extension making it unintuitive to setup for development
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	Jdlrobson
	Jun 10 2021, 8:23 PM

Description

When testing out ContentTranslation I was able to use it without BetaFeatures installed, but it wasn't displaying. As a result I wasted a good hour trying to work out the problem.

After exploring this some more, I noticed that $wgContentTranslationAsBetaFeature was set to true by default, but if BetaFeatures wasn't installed the feature was not loaded.

It didn't feel like BetaFeatures should be a required extension to use the ContentTranslation extension so I uploaded https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/ContentTranslation/+/698617 which makes the code ignore $wgContentTranslationAsBetaFeature when BetaFeatures is not available.

However this revealed another hidden dependency- GlobalPreferences. This is not listed in extension.json but I get fatals without it.

To clarify

If GlobalPreferences is a required extension it should be declared in extension.json and CI updated per James' comment in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/ContentTranslation/+/698617
If BetaFeatures is a required extension please declare it in extension.json
If neither are required please modify the extension to work without either.

Details

	Subject	Repo	Branch	Lines +/-
	Ignore wgContentTranslationAsBetaFeature value when BetaFeatures disabled	mediawiki/extensions/ContentTranslation	master	+2 -1

Customize query in gerrit

Related Objects

Duplicates Merged Here: T266378: Warning: ContentTranslation\PreferenceHelper::getGlobalPreference: Need GlobalPreferences extension. Not getting preference.

Event Timeline

Jdlrobson created this task.Jun 10 2021, 8:23 PM

Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald TranscriptJun 10 2021, 8:23 PM

Jdlrobson added a project: Language-Team.Jun 10 2021, 8:23 PM

Jdlrobson added subscribers: Jdforrester-WMF, • santhosh.

Change 698617 had a related patch set uploaded (by Jdlrobson; author: Jdlrobson):

[mediawiki/extensions/ContentTranslation@master] Ignore wgContentTranslationAsBetaFeature value when BetaFeatures disabled

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/698617

Change 698617 abandoned by Jdlrobson:

[mediawiki/extensions/ContentTranslation@master] Ignore wgContentTranslationAsBetaFeature value when BetaFeatures disabled

Reason:

Moving discussion to Phabricator to get clarity on this situation.

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/698617

Maintenance_bot removed a project: Patch-For-Review.Jun 10 2021, 9:10 PM

Jdforrester-WMF added a project: Documentation.Jun 10 2021, 11:28 PM

You are correct, the depedendencies need to be updated properly. And it is true that setting up CX for development is quite complicated.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki-Docker/Extension/ContentTranslation has a working configuration including cxserver, eventlogging, VE configuration. (Since I use docker for MW development, I keep that updated often)

For CI, we intentionally made many dependencies soft dependencies since our CI was taking too much time and became fragile with so many extensions. So CI dependencies not necessarily define the actual dependencies to get all features of ContentTranslation for a functional dev environment.

About the BetaFeatures extension check fix you did, it make sense to me. It was never noticed since our CX development setup will have BetaFeatures as we have so many beta feature related checks and UX. For a developer who occassionally submit patches to CX, this will not be obvious.

If it's helpful I can look at making GlobalPreferences a soft dependency too... I'm guessing that doesn't need to be hard for development purposes and some somewhat work?

Nikerabbit triaged this task as Medium priority.Jun 21 2021, 10:41 AM

Nikerabbit removed a project: Language-Team.

If making it a soft dependency does not complicate the code much, I do support making it a soft dependency.

Nikerabbit moved this task from Needs Triage to Enhancements on the ContentTranslation board.Oct 25 2021, 10:57 AM

Nikerabbit merged a task: T266378: Warning: ContentTranslation\PreferenceHelper::getGlobalPreference: Need GlobalPreferences extension. Not getting preference..Nov 8 2021, 11:55 AM

Nikerabbit added a subscriber: Daimona.