7ef925fb97
It is probably not that critical to understand if "09/11/2016" refers to September 11th or November 9th. I still think it's worth looking for a documentation format that is easy to understand by an international developers community. My personal best practice is to use the ISO format. Change-Id: Ib209a8a1651970d74f82c188ae4b84d1a4eb534e
2.1 KiB
4. Use webpack
Date: 2017-02-02
Status
Accepted
Context
Discussed by entire team, but predominately Sam Smith, Joaquin Hernandez and Jon Robson.
As our JavaScript becomes more complex we are making it increasingly difficult to maintain dependencies via extension.json. Dependencies and file order have to be managed and every new file creation requires an edit to extension.json. This slows down development. In Vagrant for instance NTFS file systems experience slowdown when loading many files.
There are many tools that bundle JavaScript out there that can do this for us.
Pros
- mw.popups no longer needs to be exposed as a global object
- Dependency management is no longer a manual process but automated by webpack
- Would allow us to explore template pre-compiling
- More reliable debug via source map support
- For non-MediaWiki developers it should be easier to understand our development workflow.
Cons
- There is now a build step. New developers to the extension may try to directly edit the distribution files.
- Likely to be more merge conflicts, but this could be addressed by additional tooling (e.g. post-merge build step)
Decision
There are various bundlers to choose from, but Webpack was chosen on the basis that
- It was easy to switch to another
- It is popular and well maintained.
- Many members of the team are familiar with it.
https://medium.com/@tomchentw/why-webpack-is-awesome-9691044b6b8e#.mi0mmz75y provides a good write up.
Consequences
While we migrate directory structure is likely to go through a series of changes. Specifically template loading is likely to change in future.
New JavaScript files should import and export other files via commonjs and not rely on global variables.
extension.json still needs to be updated to point to modules in MediaWiki core.
Care should be taken when including node module libraries to ensure they are not loaded by other extensions.
Developers working on the repository are now required to run npm run build
in a pre-commit hook to ensure that the right JavaScript is sent to users.