Mailing List Archive

Giving up on LiquidThreads
The Swedish Wikisource community has decided not to file any
bug report for the fact that LiquidThreads has again crashed
after the upgrade to MediaWiki 1.18. Instead, the local
village pump and other discussions will return to the old
plain wiki text format with colon indentation. We don't see
how LiquidThreads could ever become a reliable system, so
we will just pretend it never existed.

I'm personally very sorry and wish to apologize if my early
enthusiasm for LT gave anybody else the false impression that
this could be a working solution.


--
Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se



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Re: Giving up on LiquidThreads [ In reply to ]
On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 9:13 AM, Lars Aronsson <lars@aronsson.se> wrote:
> The Swedish Wikisource community has decided not to file any
> bug report for the fact that LiquidThreads has again crashed
> after the upgrade to MediaWiki 1.18.

So you aren't going to file a bug so everyone else has to suffer and
possibly find this bug themselves when it could be fixed if someone
filed it?

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Re: Giving up on LiquidThreads [ In reply to ]
On 10/12/2011 01:18 AM, K. Peachey wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 9:13 AM, Lars Aronsson<lars@aronsson.se> wrote:
>> The Swedish Wikisource community has decided not to file any
>> bug report for the fact that LiquidThreads has again crashed
>> after the upgrade to MediaWiki 1.18.
>
> So you aren't going to file a bug so everyone else has to suffer and
> possibly find this bug themselves when it could be fixed if someone
> filed it?

Correct. We have no interest in this bug getting fixed. The matter
doesn't exist anymore. It is a non-topic. This is the difference
from last time this happened. Thanks for understanding.


--
Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se



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Re: Giving up on LiquidThreads [ In reply to ]
Wow. I'm in a state of complete shock for the lack of care here, #1 for the
fact that you (or apparently the whole swedish Wikipedia community which I
find very hard to believe) can't put in the 5 minutes needed entering a bug
report for something that may effect many others, and (#2) you instead go
the route of discussion to end up at a resolution to abandon the system in
whole.

> LiquidThreads has again crashed after the upgrade to MediaWiki 1.18.

Something will always break. There are no guarantees that stuff will always
work, expect it to be wonky right after deployment (it *IS* pre-release
software)

> We don't see how LiquidThreads could ever become a reliable system

It's in the midst being rewritten
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/LiquidThreads_3.0

Honestly I'm completely blown away by the fact that the remote thought of
letting this go unreported for over a *WEEK* without being reported to the
technical staff was at any point an acceptable decision, and your response
one week later being "nah we're just not going to use this anymore".
Honestly, how do you all decide not to report an issue as bad sounding
as "crashed"
(I'm assuming a DB error of some sort). I'm pretty sure if you reported this
when it happened it would most likely be resolved by now.

Above all, you have the right to decide that you don't want LQT, but to do
so saying that there's some bug and refusing to report it because "have no
interest in this bug getting fixed" is absolutely infuriating to me and
probably other developers.

(Note: I speak for myself and my own opinions)


On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 7:38 PM, Lars Aronsson <lars@aronsson.se> wrote:

> On 10/12/2011 01:18 AM, K. Peachey wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 9:13 AM, Lars Aronsson<lars@aronsson.se> wrote:
> >> The Swedish Wikisource community has decided not to file any
> >> bug report for the fact that LiquidThreads has again crashed
> >> after the upgrade to MediaWiki 1.18.
> >
> > So you aren't going to file a bug so everyone else has to suffer and
> > possibly find this bug themselves when it could be fixed if someone
> > filed it?
>
> Correct. We have no interest in this bug getting fixed. The matter
> doesn't exist anymore. It is a non-topic. This is the difference
> from last time this happened. Thanks for understanding.
>
>
> --
> Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
> Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>



--
John
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Re: Giving up on LiquidThreads [ In reply to ]
On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 7:38 PM, Lars Aronsson <lars@aronsson.se> wrote:
> On 10/12/2011 01:18 AM, K. Peachey wrote:
>> On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 9:13 AM, Lars Aronsson<lars@aronsson.se>  wrote:
>>> The Swedish Wikisource community has decided not to file any
>>> bug report for the fact that LiquidThreads has again crashed
>>> after the upgrade to MediaWiki 1.18.
>>
>> So you aren't going to file a bug so everyone else has to suffer and
>> possibly find this bug themselves when it could be fixed if someone
>> filed it?
>
> Correct. We have no interest in this bug getting fixed. The matter
> doesn't exist anymore. It is a non-topic. This is the difference
> from last time this happened. Thanks for understanding.
>

I will be more than happy to file the bug in Bugzilla for you, if you
could at least summarize what is crashing.

-Chad

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Re: Giving up on LiquidThreads [ In reply to ]
Before everyone else jumps on Lars here, I'm going to try and make a
bit of sense of this situation as I see it (puts on his Sumanah hat).
It's primarily a misunderstanding.

a) Lars may not be a native english speaker, and is here representing
his community's decisions, please do not read too much into his tone.
b) The Swedish community clearly did not fully understand that
experimental status of LQT, that it is not deemed ready for production
use.

A review of events as they seem to me:
#1 So during the 1.17 upgrade LQT brroke for the Swedish community,
they filed bugs and went "it happens" thinking this was fully tested
production mw.org supported extension.
#2 Then it broke in 1.18 again and they went (and I'm extrapolating
here) "ugh, this isn't a one time thing, there are big problems here
we don't want to babysit this extension when so many of our users are
unhappy every time it breaks, leaving us with non-working talk pages."
#3 So they talked it over and decided to go back to regular talk pages.
#4 They let us know through mw.org mailing list that they weren't
about to use what they view as such a poorly supported extension.

Since I love analogies, they feel like they went to the store and
bought a game (Rage for the PC), brought it home and it was buggy as
hell, they submitted reports about the problems. Then after the next
patch it was still buggy. This time they went back to the store and
got a refund, they didn't take the time to file meticulous bug reports
(that is non-trivial to do for regular users and admins imo). They
really don't care anymore about whatever bugs it may have, they've
moved on.

Of course the misunderstanding here is that LQT is production ready
and would operate more-or-less bugfree (in terms of show stoppers and
major problems). This just isn't the case.

So it's unfortunate that the Swedish community has been operating
under this assumption, but they clearly made the right decision for
their users if they need something stable right now and aren't ready
to deal with big problems right now during upgrades.

Lars I hope this clears thing up for you, and you can go back to your
community with a bit of enthusiasm restored, we care about LQT, it's
getting better, and maybe one day we'll have a "production" ready
version that you can try out again and re-evaluate with your users.
But that day is not today.

From our perspective, perhaps more can be done to clearly indicate the
status of extensions and who they appropriate for.

- Finlay

On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 8:01 PM, John Du Hart <compwhizii@gmail.com> wrote:
> Wow. I'm in a state of complete shock for the lack of care here, #1 for the
> fact that you (or apparently the whole swedish Wikipedia community which I
> find very hard to believe) can't put in the 5 minutes needed entering a bug
> report for something that may effect many others, and (#2) you instead go
> the route of discussion to end up at a resolution to abandon the system in
> whole.
>
>> LiquidThreads has again crashed after the upgrade to MediaWiki 1.18.
>
> Something will always break. There are no guarantees that stuff will always
> work, expect it to be wonky right after deployment (it *IS* pre-release
> software)
>
>> We don't see how LiquidThreads could ever become a reliable system
>
> It's in the midst being rewritten
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/LiquidThreads_3.0
>
> Honestly I'm completely blown away by the fact that the remote thought of
> letting this go unreported for over a *WEEK* without being reported to the
> technical staff was at any point an acceptable decision, and your response
> one week later being "nah we're just not going to use this anymore".
> Honestly, how do you all decide not to report an issue as bad sounding
> as "crashed"
> (I'm assuming a DB error of some sort). I'm pretty sure if you reported this
> when it happened it would most likely be resolved by now.
>
> Above all, you have the right to decide that you don't want LQT, but to do
> so saying that there's some bug and refusing to report it because "have no
> interest in this bug getting fixed" is absolutely infuriating to me and
> probably other developers.
>
> (Note: I speak for myself and my own opinions)
>
>
> On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 7:38 PM, Lars Aronsson <lars@aronsson.se> wrote:
>
>> On 10/12/2011 01:18 AM, K. Peachey wrote:
>> > On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 9:13 AM, Lars Aronsson<lars@aronsson.se>  wrote:
>> >> The Swedish Wikisource community has decided not to file any
>> >> bug report for the fact that LiquidThreads has again crashed
>> >> after the upgrade to MediaWiki 1.18.
>> >
>> > So you aren't going to file a bug so everyone else has to suffer and
>> > possibly find this bug themselves when it could be fixed if someone
>> > filed it?
>>
>> Correct. We have no interest in this bug getting fixed. The matter
>> doesn't exist anymore. It is a non-topic. This is the difference
>> from last time this happened. Thanks for understanding.
>>
>>
>> --
>>   Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
>>   Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikitech-l mailing list
>> Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>>
>
>
>
> --
> John
> _______________________________________________
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>

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Re: Giving up on LiquidThreads [ In reply to ]
Hoi,
At translatewiki.net we continue to use LiquidThreads. As you may know, twn
is running on the bleeding edge of the MediaWiki software. This implies that
the bug indicated for 1.18 is actually not there in the head software.

Personally I love LQT. I positively hate the old talk system; it is so
messy!
Thanks,
GerardM

On 12 October 2011 01:13, Lars Aronsson <lars@aronsson.se> wrote:

> The Swedish Wikisource community has decided not to file any
> bug report for the fact that LiquidThreads has again crashed
> after the upgrade to MediaWiki 1.18. Instead, the local
> village pump and other discussions will return to the old
> plain wiki text format with colon indentation. We don't see
> how LiquidThreads could ever become a reliable system, so
> we will just pretend it never existed.
>
> I'm personally very sorry and wish to apologize if my early
> enthusiasm for LT gave anybody else the false impression that
> this could be a working solution.
>
>
> --
> Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
> Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
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Re: Giving up on LiquidThreads [ In reply to ]
It still seems to be functional on en.wikinews also. Maybe it's
configuration specific for se.ws?

-Jon

On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 21:35, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com>wrote:

> Hoi,
> At translatewiki.net we continue to use LiquidThreads. As you may know,
> twn
> is running on the bleeding edge of the MediaWiki software. This implies
> that
> the bug indicated for 1.18 is actually not there in the head software.
>
> Personally I love LQT. I positively hate the old talk system; it is so
> messy!
> Thanks,
> GerardM
>
> On 12 October 2011 01:13, Lars Aronsson <lars@aronsson.se> wrote:
>
> > The Swedish Wikisource community has decided not to file any
> > bug report for the fact that LiquidThreads has again crashed
> > after the upgrade to MediaWiki 1.18. Instead, the local
> > village pump and other discussions will return to the old
> > plain wiki text format with colon indentation. We don't see
> > how LiquidThreads could ever become a reliable system, so
> > we will just pretend it never existed.
> >
> > I'm personally very sorry and wish to apologize if my early
> > enthusiasm for LT gave anybody else the false impression that
> > this could be a working solution.
> >
> >
> > --
> > Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
> > Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>



--
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http://snowulf.com/
http://ipv6wiki.net/
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Re: Giving up on LiquidThreads [ In reply to ]
The discussion is at

http://sv.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:M%C3%B6tesplatsen#1.18-buggar

and the talk page

http://sv.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisourcediskussion:M%C3%B6tesplatsen#1.18

I successfully created a LQ thread on my sv.ws talk page. :/

http://sv.wikisource.org/wiki/Anv%C3%A4ndardiskussion:John_Vandenberg

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Re: Giving up on LiquidThreads [ In reply to ]
On 12 October 2011 07:35, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:
> Personally I love LQT. I positively hate the old talk system; it is so
> messy!

And I have love-hate relationship with it. We (translatewiki.net) too
have long ago stopped filing bug reports against LQT, because they
just don't get any attention. We have been waiting for the rewrite to
finish for so long I can't remember anymore, at least six months. We
somehow manage to live with the issues, but it is not fun by any
means. I'm not surprised that someone else gave up.

-Niklas
--
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Re: Giving up on LiquidThreads [ In reply to ]
On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 3:08 PM, Niklas Laxström
<niklas.laxstrom@gmail.com>wrote:

> On 12 October 2011 07:35, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Personally I love LQT. I positively hate the old talk system; it is so
> > messy!
>
> And I have love-hate relationship with it. We (translatewiki.net) too
> have long ago stopped filing bug reports against LQT, because they
> just don't get any attention. We have been waiting for the rewrite to
> finish for so long I can't remember anymore, at least six months. We
> somehow manage to live with the issues, but it is not fun by any
> means. I'm not surprised that someone else gave up.
>

Last time I checked, work on LQT was postponed in favor of MoodBar. With all
due respect to new trends of editor retention, isn't the old discussion
system one of main things that scares noobs off?

--
Best regards,
Max Semenik ([[User:MaxSem]])
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Re: Giving up on LiquidThreads [ In reply to ]
On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 08:08, Niklas Laxström <niklas.laxstrom@gmail.com>wrote:

> On 12 October 2011 07:35, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Personally I love LQT. I positively hate the old talk system; it is so
> > messy!
>
> And I have love-hate relationship with it. We (translatewiki.net) too
> have long ago stopped filing bug reports against LQT, because they
> just don't get any attention. We have been waiting for the rewrite to
> finish for so long I can't remember anymore, at least six months. We
> somehow manage to live with the issues, but it is not fun by any
> means. I'm not surprised that someone else gave up.
>

+100, as a user from ptwikibooks.
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Re: Giving up on LiquidThreads [ In reply to ]
When en.wn switched to LQT, we started to get a decent amount more comments
per article. Not that all the comments we got were necessarily "good", but
it did show that more people had been wanting to comment than were doing so
with the old system (IE regular wiki pages).

-Jon

On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 04:49, Max Semenik <maxsem.wiki@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 3:08 PM, Niklas Laxström
> <niklas.laxstrom@gmail.com>wrote:
>
> > On 12 October 2011 07:35, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> > > Personally I love LQT. I positively hate the old talk system; it is so
> > > messy!
> >
> > And I have love-hate relationship with it. We (translatewiki.net) too
> > have long ago stopped filing bug reports against LQT, because they
> > just don't get any attention. We have been waiting for the rewrite to
> > finish for so long I can't remember anymore, at least six months. We
> > somehow manage to live with the issues, but it is not fun by any
> > means. I'm not surprised that someone else gave up.
> >
>
> Last time I checked, work on LQT was postponed in favor of MoodBar. With
> all
> due respect to new trends of editor retention, isn't the old discussion
> system one of main things that scares noobs off?
>
> --
> Best regards,
> Max Semenik ([[User:MaxSem]])
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
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> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>



--
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Re: Giving up on LiquidThreads [ In reply to ]
LQT's got exactly as many developers attached to it as it ever has
had: one (part-time). Andrew has continued his work on the backend
rewrite, and if you report bugs, he'll fix them. But I completely
understand that projects may wish to disable or not adopt LQT given
the glacial pace of development.

That's consistent with the prioritization in
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Product_Whitepaper -- we just
simply don't have the resources to give it the amount of love that
it'll need right now. And while I agree it's tremendously important to
replace talk pages (I wrote the original LQT proposal in 2004 for that
reason, and shepherded the initial development), it's also
tremendously difficult to do right -- not quite Visual Editor scale of
complexity, but close.

So unless we end up partnering on this e.g. with Wikia or a chapter,
it'll likely not pick up again until mid-2012. But until then, we at
least owe it to the project and the community to keep it maintained so
the codebase doesn't rot and users who have chosen to use it aren't
completely frustrated. So please do report bugs and major UI/UX
issues, and perhaps we can organize a LQT bug triage soon.
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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