What's new in MW for July 3, 2020

by on 6 July 2020 09:27 (EDT)

Tags:	News

From the recent #mwstake meeting:

• 1.35 (out in a few weeks) will be the last release to support Internet Explorer (Template:Phab:T248061)
• Uncached VisualEditor w/ Parsoid/PHP (no JS, no RESTBase) for MW 1.35 LTS (Template:Phab:T248343)
• SkinTemplateOutputPageBeforeExec and a number of other hooks are being deprecated (Template:Phab:T60137).
  • See the email announcing this and Jon Robinson's notes about how skins are changing in MW 1.35
• Extensions can now provide alternative database backends. Oracle and MS SQL are being moved out of core (instead of the core MySQL, Postgres etc): Template:Phab:T226857
• Gerrit updated to version 3. You can now create and edit patches via the web interface.
  • But Gerrit will be replaced by GitLab next year.
  • GitLab's interface and work-flow is more similar to Github's, but it allows the WMF to host it. (See Gitlab's comparison to Github or a (less biased?) comparison from UserSnap.)
  • Related, [[mw:Wikimedia_Release_Engineering_Team/CI_Futures_WG WMF's CI working group] recommended replacing Jenkins with mw:Wikimedia Release Engineering Team/CI Futures WG/Report.
  • There is a proposal to change the MediaWiki logo with options available for consideration.