On 04/27/2012 05:42 AM, Vincent Massol wrote:
Hi devs,
Sergiu has extracted the AutoTag plugin from oldcore in its own module. That's cool.
However he's also marked it @deprecated while doing so. And he's stopped bundling it in XE.
This raises several question:
1) Do we consider that what the plugin does it not useful? Because if we consider it's useful we might not want to deprecate it without offering an alternative. It's not because a technology is deprecated that we should deprecate stuff using that technology. Deprecated means: don't use this, instead use that. BTW it should be our rule that when we add the @deprecated tag we also mention what to use instead.
I'd say yes. This plugin has one functionality: extract the most frequent 100 words from a piece of text. Still, I'm not happy at all with the code: it works correctly only for the French language (and partial support for English), has some performance issues, works best for xwiki/1.0 syntax and HTML output, and has some CSS needs that currently aren't found anywhere in the platform. While cleaning it up I also fixed some concurrency issues. I believe it was used only in the XWiki Watch project, and XWiki Watch has been deprecated as well.
2) If we consider it's not useful anymore. We have 2 choices: 2a) Move it in legacy modules 2b) Move it to retired/contrib
I'd say 2b). This already happened one year ago, when we deprecated other plugins and modules, see http://markmail.org/thread/7i7wx7j4zowmxmwq and http://purl.org/xwiki/rn/ReleaseNotesXWikiEnterprise32#HDeprecatedandRetired...
My opinion: * It could be useful but I'm not sure the XWiki Dev team wants to support it. IMO it should not be deprecated since it can still be useful and there's no replacement for it.
It has barely been supported at all. After being committed in March 2007, I did three rounds of code cleanup, and Jerome applied a patch from Anca to add some support for English one year later. I don't remember having any user feedback on this plugin in its 5 years of existence.
* Since I don't think the XWiki Dev Team should support it, I'd move it to xwiki-contrib/retired and publish it on e.x.o. for users who want to still use it. * Since this is breaking our new rule regarding deprecations/legacy it requires a VOTE to move it to contrib/retired. It also needs to be clearly mentioned in the Release Notes as a breakage and explain how user can add it back to their wikis.
Let me know what you think and I'll send a VOTE if you agree with what I said above.
-- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu/