VE doesn't work with ProofreadPage, and the outstanding bugs are not being worked on. There are a few that are impacting normal operation (e.g. T183950) that will be far easier to fix if we're not trying to keep things working for VE.
The consensus amongst the Wikisource developers at the triage meeting today was that we should remove VE support for the time being, and reintroduce it (probably behind a feature flag) at a future time when there more people keen to work on it.
| Subject | Repo | Branch | Lines +/- | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Removes Page: pages VisualEditor | mediawiki/extensions/ProofreadPage | master | +2 -985 |
Wouldn’t it be acceptable to remove all links to VE, but keep it usable via URL? This is how e.g. talk pages work. If there are no links to it, it’s clear that it’s unsupported and nobody may complain even if it becomes more broken than currently it is (e.g. when fixing T183950), but if one wants to experiment with it, it remains possible. Since the long-term goal is to make VE compatible with ProofreadPage, code that supports VE generally shouldn’t be removed anyway, so keeping VE URL-accessible doesn’t prevent cleaning up technical debt.
Sam, I know there's a fair bit of code touching this, but as a simple start, do you want to turn off the visual editor in the relevant namespaces? That's a simple config change, and it should stop people from accidentally using it.
Yeah, I was wondering about adding a feature flag for all the VE support bits, but it might be tricky. At the moment, the bugs are impacting other things more than just people trying to use VE with PRP, so the priority is to get those sorted.
@Tpt raised the interesting point at the meeting that if we get rid of the header and footer (after moving proofread status into a separate Slot) then VE suport becomes much much easier and so in that scenario the current code wouldn't be of use anyway.
All up, I feel like we need to do what's easiest (to code, and to review) given the lack of any dedicated resources for PRP. I'll dig into it a bit more and add more detail here.
Change 787866 had a related patch set uploaded (by Tpt; author: Tpt):
[mediawiki/extensions/ProofreadPage@master] Removes Page: pages VisualEditor
Change 787866 merged by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/extensions/ProofreadPage@master] Removes Page: pages VisualEditor