MediaWiki robchurch on 28 Mar 2007 09:32 pm
Crap attracts crap…
I’ve been hacking up query pages so that results are formatted into galleries when the report deals with images; things like uncategorised images, unused files, etc.
All well and good, but it reminded me just how old the query page mechanism is in the general lifecycle of portions of our code, and it reminded me how crappy some of it was, with no direct offence intended to whoever actually wrote it.
Unfortunately, quick-fix code usually attracts nastier hacks on top, and as we all know, this makes for horrible, unmaintainable code. This is often a norm with the MediaWiki codebase, although some modules seem to get rewritten often enough to keep a clear cycle of efficient, clean, comprehensive code in place.
There are several portions of the code base which we probably need to gut; the image storage backend is long overdue an overhaul, but that’s a major project, and major projects sap up review time. Time which we don’t really have.
on 29 Mar 2007 at 1:57 pm 1.brion said …
The QueryPage class has seen a lot of cruft accumulated and, indeed, it kinda sucks.
A cleaner replacement would be nice…
Tim’s working on the image backend now; that’s a big project and will take a bit longer.
on 29 Mar 2007 at 3:49 pm 2.robchurch said …
I’d suspected Tim was working on it, but didn’t want to say anything…still, good news.
I’ve been messing about with the idea of ripping out the QueryPage system in favour of a cleaner “Reports” system which is a bit prettier and quite a bit more flexible, but so far, only bits and pieces of incomplete stuff here and there.
I think I might make it my next little project.