Topic on Skin talk:GuMaxDD

Hi @User:WikiForMen

You appear to be reverting my changes to mark this skin as unmaintained.

I recently had to self merge the most recent change to the skin as I couldnt find a maintainer to make this skin work on the latest MediaWiki.

A skin can be unmaintained but still work. Unmaintained simply means nobody appears to be keeping the skin up to date.

Can you please explain why you think this skin is stabled. are you planning to maintain it?

I'd appreciate having a constructive conversation here rather than an edit war.

IMHO, a piece of software with the last update a week ago is not to considered unmaintained. How do you define unmaintained?--WikiForMen (talk) 22:43, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

FYI on the subject of updates.The last update a week ago as far as I can see however was a patch by me (I am not maintaining it) and some gerrit configuration by Release Engineering?

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/q/project:mediawiki/skins/GuMaxDD+AND+status:merged

On github there is a patch from ashley, but this is a mirror - https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-skins-GuMaxDD/commits/master - so those patches are not showing up in the Gerrit version.

Thank you for this clarification.--WikiForMen (talk) 23:44, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

Unmaintained = not keeping up to date with recent mediawiki developments and not accepting/responding to pull request/bug reports. When the last commit was doesn't really matter too much, but more that their is a communication channel for users.

I've created a new Phabricator project here https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/mediawiki-skins-gumaxdd/ for capturing issues as that's important if this is maintained.

But, as I've pointed out below I was confused with thinking this was Skin:GuMax.

You set the state of my skins to unknown too. Your comment "Status unknown.[1] Not working with latest MediaWiki.[2] No readme.md on github.[3]" [3] First: It has a readme.md. Second: I didn't wanted to have three repositories, because the handling of all three skins is the same. [2] First: What ist "the latest MediaWiki" for you. For my it is REL_1.35 until REL 1.36.0 is released. Second: What is "not working" for you. Do you have a bug report? On my demo site all skins are working fine. Third: In the info box is listed for which version I did the stuff and the last is obviously REL 1.35. [1] I did test installations with all this versions and they do fine.--WikiForMen (talk) 23:43, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

@Jack Phoenix as a listed author do you know if this skin is still actively maintained?

I'm possibly very confused here. I now see this is not the same as Skin:GuMax.

Is this a fork of that? If so can it be mentioned and the author fields updated?

Indeed Skin:GuMaxDD is NOT the same as Skin:GuMax. Skin GuMax with latest version 2012, on the other hand, is undeniably unmaintained.--WikiForMen (talk) 22:46, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

Got it! So I must admit I was a little confused about the two. I thought they were related. I think it would be super helpful if this page accounted better for their relation better (I assume this is a fork?) and if the repo had a readme.

Are the maintainers the same? It doesn't sound like Paul Gu has been involved for some time... it rather seems like this is a skin based on Paul's work. Is that correct?

I have no idea, but I guess, it is not a fork but a new development.--WikiForMen (talk) 23:25, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

Reping Jack Phoenix since the previous ping was broken due to linking to the main namespace, not the user namespace.

@Pppery:: Thanks for the ping!

To clarify the situation a bit...I think Paul Gu's wiki page on the MediaWiki skins he authored answers it the best: "GuMax now has THREE main branches, one is dedicated to horizontal navigation menu layout, drop down menu layout, and vertical navigation menu layout." Sadly Paul's wiki is not exactly in the most usable shape right now, though the download links etc. do work, if you can find them; the Internet Archive is very helpful in this regard.

The skin this page is about, GuMaxDD, is the "drop down menu layout" variant of the GuMax skin written by Paul Gu. There was no public version control repo for this skin, or any of the skins, so I created a git repo, imported the unzipped versions of the source code downloaded from Paul's site into this repo, and this repo was later on imported to WMF gerrit as mediawiki/skins/GuMaxDD.

I don't know about the other two GuMax variants (vertical/horizontal navigation menu layouts), but I presume that one of them is indeed the original Skin:GuMax; those two are currently unmaintained. I've fixed GuMaxDD and tested it against MediaWiki 1.35 and added new stuff nowadays considered standard, like Extension:Echo compatibility, so the GuMaxDD skin is certainly very much functional and maintained, much like the other extensions and skins I('ve ended up) maintain(ing).

On the topic of README files: I'm not a huge fan of them, generally speaking. All too often they end up becoming unmaintained, outdated, useless clutter. A wiki page is easier to edit and more editable by a wider community, whereas README changes etc. have to go through the normal code review process (by which I mean "bitrot to death in gerrit if the author isn't willing to poke a bunch of people all the time and then some"). That's why the SocialProfile extension, for example, has a rather basic README that mostly points to the MW.org info page.

Hope this clarifies the situation, and please feel free to ping me again should you have any further questions!

Thanks all for getting to the bottom of this and for being patient with me! Looks like we're in a much better state now!