Topic on Talk:Stable interface policy/Frontend

In the hackathon we talked about a mailing list for frontend-related announcements (like cloud-announce, analytics-announce, etc.). We should do something about it.

Agreed. I think the main audience would be gadget developers - so perhaps gadget-announce? The release notes and developer console should suffice for other breaking changes. What do you think?

it's not technically correct: js changes can break user scripts too. But naming is hard

How about wiki-hosted-code-announce ?

User:Izno, User:MusikAnimal, User:Stjn, User:Novem_Linguae, User:Nardog, User:Nikki as people who I hope would subscribe to such a mailing list - do you have any opinion on the name of the list and whether it would be useful?

I'd love to use such a mailing list for advertising the upcoming phab:T303488 for example.

Thanks for the ping. Fix ping to Nardog. I don't think hosted-code-announce is precise enough. Throwing out some ideas: gadget-announce, user-script-announce, front-end-announce, javascript-announce, gadgets-l, userscripts-l, frontend-l, javascript-l. Of those I think I like frontend-l the best so far. Hope this helps.

The link to Nardog's userpage still isn't working. Not sure if ping worked or not. This talk page thing we're using is Extension:Flow right? And it's getting sunset? Guess I'll hold off on a bug ticket.

Nardog – that should work. I guess it doesn't…

I have no strong feelings but "frontend-l" as Novem suggests sounds fine. Announcements might involve CSS as well as JS, right?

Thanks for starting this initiative!

Do we want this to be low traffic? If so, perhaps frontend-announce and use it strictly for reporting breaking changes ?

Or are we really looking for a new community to discuss best practices? This policy itself could be discusses there for example? In which case frontend-l makes sense but it might steal traffic from wikitech-l.

Or.. both?!

I got pings from all three of you. I just don't have a user page on this wiki or on Meta so it's a red link.

Lol sorry! It's actually linking to User:Nardog?action=edit&redlink=1, hence why we were unsure if the ping worked.

I think it should stay low-traffic and for announce only: For many wikipedians that we are asking them to join this mailing list, they want to only receive important updates not all sorts of random inquiries. People who like to do so, they can join wikitech-l or other forums.

I don't personally sign up for mailing lists for the tech side as I do a fairly good job of keeping watch of relevant projects on Phabricator (and similarly for non-tech stuff things bubble up in various channels).

I'm wondering what the utility is of a -announce list if we already have Tech News (for the gadget-minded) and wikitech/mediawiki lists for the skin/dev minded?

And on that thought, why not just add a Tech News announcement email to wikitech-l?

*-announce has the implication that posting to it is restricted and replies get redirected to another list (presumably wikitech-l). *-l has the implication that pretty much anyone can post or respond there. IMO wikitech-l is fine for discussing frontend issues (it gets 1-2 mails per day so assuming a new *-l would be functional at all, it wouldn't really reduce the amount of emails gadget maintainers have to read). So a new *-announce list makes sense to me (good for people who want to get near-zero volume of messages) but a new *-l does not.

As for the name (obviously it's a bit of a bikeshed) my vote would be for "gadget" (gadgets are intended to replace other kinds of user scripts, we just didn't get there yet). "frontend" sounds nice too but maybe suggests a more generic purpose than the list would actually have.

To add to the bikeshed perhaps wikitech-announce would make sense if we're open to including all sorts of announcements relating to breaking changes? I believe backend stable policy requires emails to wikitech-l but that could perhaps use the new mailing list too?

wikitech-l is "the list for discussing the technical aspects and organization of the Wikimedia projects, for developers discussing technical aspects and organization of Wikimedia projects". So wikitech-announce makes sense if you think the audience is limited to Wikimedia.

The PHP stable interface policy says "hard deprecation [without a warning period] can be applied by announcing the removal on wikitech-l in a timely manner" and "deprecation with far-reaching impact SHOULD be announced by email to wikitech-l or mediawiki-l". (The default communication channel is the PHP warnings themselves + the release notes, so most deprecations aren't announced anywhere.) Web API deprecations are announced on mediawiki-api-announce (and the action API also uses a warning mechanism; not sure if other web APIs have something similar). Wikidata has its own set of channels.

What if we used the existing api-announce then? After all what we have here is a frontend API that we are making breaking changes to.

The MediaWiki-API-announce list is for the Action API, not general APIs people care about. You won't reach your audience there, and you'll spam a bunch of people who don't and won't care. Creating wikitech-announce for this seems sensible.

In practice it's also used by the the REST API deprecation policy and I'd imagine some gadget authors are already subscribed to it because gadgets tend to use APIs as well. OTOH I'd expect most people to interpret "API" as "web API" (which is how e.g. the API: namespace on mw.org is used); PHP interface breaking changes are also announced on wikitech-l.

So I think api-announce is a workable idea but I too like wikitech-announce more.

One thing that came up during the feedback policy was the suggestion that relying on tech news makes in-efficient use of volunteer team since not everyone reading tech news can help.

If we did have a mailing list, perhaps a requirement of giving someone interface rights on a wiki could be that they are required to subscribe to this mailing list.

Not everyone who needs this information is an interface admin – some may develop user scripts, or develop gadgets by making edit requests. Also, some interface admins may not be willing to share their email addresses, or not even have one (remember that in order to create a SUL account, providing an email address is only recommended, not mandatory). Most of the Tech News entries are irrelevant to most readers, but there aren’t that many that this would be a real problem IMO.

I was thinking about this discussion in the context of phab:T344067 ("Gadget icons may go missing - how to fix") -- TLDR: that task affects ~45 gadgets (most of which are copies of a single specific darkmode gadget) and ~45 user-CSS pages. When we added that to Tech News, it frustrated me that thousands[1] of people were likely to read something that only a tiny handful of people can help with.[2]

For a task like that, I think we essentially want a way to reach some specific Interface Admins (IAs). It isn't practical to manually construct a custom MassMessage target-list for each time something like this occurs, especially as we want to be more communicative (higher quantity) about things like this (and hence related concerns for just using Tech News to do it). We also want to avoid making the signal-to-noise ratio even worse at smaller wikis' Village Pumps (phab:T130602 et al).

I'm not sure if a new mailinglist is a practical solution, unless we require subscription. (and while IA's are required to have 2FA, I don't believe that 2FA requires a registered email, so Tacsipacsi is correct about that concern, as well as the privacy concern.) And even then it wouldn't reach userscript-devs who are almost impossible to comprehensively list.

For the narrower use-cases like my example: We've linked to GlobalSearch a few times in similar tasks, and I wonder (pipedream?) if it would be possible to use results from that, along with the {{ping}} feature, via some kind of simple scripting? -- E.g. Perhaps it's possible to hack together a quick tool that matches "wikinames from GlobalSearch results" with "complete list of all IAs on each wiki"(?), so that if we wanted to contact the IAs from (xxwiki, yywiki, zzwiki, ...) we could get a copy & pasteable {{ping|alice|bob|charlie}} that any dev could then easily use in a talkpage post on m:Tech noticeboard, and use a page like that as the central location.(?)

Overall, the choices are basically: Mailing list, Onwiki broad announcement, Onwiki targeted message, Onwiki centralized ping. All have many pros and cons. They could even be combined, e.g. "new announce mailing list, + manually copy it to a centralized noticeboard".

To get any further with this discussion, I think it might help to have additional examples of the kinds of content we'd expect to be communicating, so that we can think about the target-audience more clearly. I.e. Beyond phab:T344067 and phab:T303488.

I hope these thoughts help! Sorry for the length.

[1] (Tech News currently reaches: ~300 notice-boards and ~700 individuals onwiki, plus ~900 Diff-blog subscribers and ~600 wikitech-ambassadors@ subscribers)

[2] (even fewer people than the usual small-ish quantity likely to be interested in any average Tech News entry, as Tacsipacsi notes.)

I think the goal is not so much to make sure to directly ping everyone who might be affected but to have a place where people who want their tools to be high-reliability can learn about changes up front, and people who want to spend less effort on tool maintenance can look at the list of recent changes if their tool does get affected.