Last modified: 2013-10-03 16:32:43 UTC
It's very unclear to a newcomer to MediaWiki core what coding guidelines they need to adhere to. I still see various PHP unit, JSLint and QUnit errors reported by Jenkin's suggesting people are unclear or unable to run these things locally. MobileFrontend has been using a Makefile and sample pre commit hooks to make this clearer. If nothing else it points to what tests a developer is expected to run, where tests reside and how tests are run. I understand that grunt is used by a few teams and I think a lot of these best practices should be codified into a Makefile to give better visibility to them. A Makefile is usually the first thing I look for in a project. I began adding one to core here: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/75268/ but it was surprisingly met with a few objections. I've now abandoned it has I'd rather not invest time fixing this patch until we have consensus that this is useful but I truly believe it is. Please can we spec out and agree whether this would be a good thing and what this would look like so it can be implemented?
I could swear there used to be a makefile that could run the unit tests etc...