"Steve Bennett" <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote in
message news:b8ceeef70711071955m74ce9ac7q992cbe751fc9415d@mail.gmail.com...
On 11/8/07, Simetrical
<Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote:
4) All of this breaks a thousand different corner
cases and half the
parser tests. The implementers carefully go
through every failed
parser test, rewrite it to the actual output, and carefully justify
why this is the correct course of action. Or just assume it is,
depending on the level of care.
Sounds good to me. I wonder also if there is any chance of implementing
two
parsers and migrating slowly from one to the next.
Perhaps all Wikipedia
pages starting with Ab... could be rendered with the new parser while
others
use the old? Pages using the new parser could have a
warning displayed
like
"Are there problems with the way the content is
displayed? Click here...".
And wait for people to actually report perceived problems - as opposed to
the page failing a regression test.
Well - we'll need some kind of flag in the DB to indicate which of the
parsers should be used to render the page, otherwise the entire history will
be borked. Therefore any conversion needn't be so formal.
E.g.
* Bot goes through existing pages and parses with the new parser and the old
parser and passes results through tidy. Any identical pages get silently
'upgraded' to the new parser.
* Any pages that don't matched get added to [[Category:Pages that need fixup
for the new parser]] but don't get upgraded automatically. Possibly limit
this so bot only runs when size of category is <1000 or something.
* An option when saving to 'upgrade' to new parser (no reverse option) for
pages still on the old one. In these cases it's up to the user to check the
page - the preview function will show the result of the new parser.
* We could also provide a tool to show the diff between the two different
outputs (or to display the two versions for visual comparison).
- Mark Clements (HappyDog)