Stakeholder(s):
- MediaWiki developers (core and extensions) will benefit from clearer, more testable code
- Extension developers (in WMF and elsewhere) will have more control over the behavior of pages their extension manages.
- Quality + test engineering may be interested since we are making code more testable by removing access to global state
- The Performance team should be consulted to ensure the proposed changes do not introduce performance issues
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Problem:
- For historical reasons, MediaWiki uses a number of global variables to represent the execution context. Usually, these variables are not accessed directly but via a RequestContext, but they still exist, and are in fact needed by RequestContext.
- RequestContext is a kitchen-sink, bundling access to too many parts of the system, causing spurious dependencies to be introduced across the code base.
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Solution:
- Define a clear pattern for creating a RequestContext, and providing it to the code that needs it.
- Deprecate some parts of RequestContext to make it more lightweight
- Similarly, provide a clear information flow to provide relevant information to code that should not have access to a full RequestContext.
- Replace global variables with stubs that emit deprecation warnings.
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Aligned Goals:
- Improve code quality by reducing coupling
- Improve code health by improving testability
- Improve maintainability by modeling domain concepts clearly
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Success Metrics:
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