7 Nov
2017
7 Nov
'17
3:58 p.m.
The second topic of interest was the extension pages that are designed to
be modified, like the demo AWM apps or intro blog post, homepage, etc.
1) IMO, all these pages should be separated from the code pages of an
extension and moved to a "-content" extension. At this point, we could
introduce a flag on a XAR extension that its pages are modifiable and all
the above described limitations will not be enforced and, on upgrade, the
user would be free to choose what happens to the changes (i.e. discard,
backup or even merge).
2) The second option would be to explicitly mark (in the extension
descriptor ?) modifiable pages inside a XAR extension, so to continue
mixing code pages with content pages, but I would prefer we would not
continue to do it. I guess this would be towards proposal 3) from Thomas,
but I think I would prefer it to be done from an extension level, and not
page level (since that would imply editing the page and might collide with
previous decisions).
Thanks,
Eduard
On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 4:43 PM, Eduard Moraru <enygma2002(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
One option I was discussion with Caty that would cover the need to not
have code pages modified, while also allowing devs (including us) to work
and experiment is that we only add a warning/banner in edit mode on pages
belonging to an extension, informing the user that their changes *will be
discarded when upgrading* and what he could do instead, to keep them.
So, when upgrading to a new version, we would have the following
directions to decide on:
1) We could show the list of modified extensions with options for each
extensions (not each document) to:
a) discard changes
b) backup changes
c) merge changes (I would personally not be in favor of keeping this,
since it will be too tempting for everyone to abuse it and we would be back
at the current state when upgrades take a very long time and are hard to do)
2) We could simply discard any modifications done on the extensions and
upgrade to the newest version (i.e. never do the 3-way merge)
The main idea is that you are free to do changes and experiment, but if
you want your work to be used in production or to survive an upgrade, you
need to do one of the following things:
A) Contribute your changes so that they are included in the next version
of the application.
B) Publish your changes as a fork of the application. Optionally, it could
be a light fork which only contains the modified pages and has a fixed
version dependency on the standard application. It will be your job to keep
your fork up to date, otherwise you will be stuck using an older version of
the application. If the application is part of the Standard Flavor and
because of the fixed dependency version, it will mean you will not be able
to upgrade XWiki either until you update your fork first. If you don't use
a fixed version dependency, you risk upgrading the standard application to
a version that is no longer compatible with your changes.
Thanks,
Eduard
On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 4:16 PM, Thomas Mortagne <thomas.mortagne(a)xwiki.com
wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 1:02 PM, Ecaterina Moraru (Valica)
> <valicac(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 1:00 PM, Thomas Mortagne <
> thomas.mortagne(a)xwiki.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >> Hi devs,
> >>
> >> We started to think about https://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-14377
> >> with Caty and she noticed that it might not be as simple as "all
> >> extensions pages are protected" because there is extensions pages that
> >> are almost always supposed to be modified: first example is
> >> Main.WebHome which is modified 99% of the time but another good one is
> >> Sandbox or Quicklinks panel.
> >>
> >> So what do we do about it ?
> >>
> >> I'm not fully sure yet but here are some ideas :
> >>
> >> 1) So what ? It's still extension pages and you might still have
> >> conflicts during next upgrade. If you want standard pages to be
> >> modified then generate them during install.
> >>
> >> 2) Only show the warning when a page is hidden and consider all non
> >> hidden pages as OK to modify
> >>
> >> 3) Explicitly mark each standard page that is OK to be modified with
> >> some xobject
> >> 3.a) EM XAR handler behave with these pages as it always did
> >> 3.b) EM XAR handler has a special support for these pages controlled
> >> by one of the xobject fields (skip the document from any merge if
> >> there is any customization, always overwrite any customization, etc.)
> >>
> >> WDYT ?
> >>
> >> 1) might be too harsh, generating Main.WebHome might be doable (but
> >> still a pain to maintain) but it's quite a pain to generate the whole
> >> Sandbox space (and not even talking about maintaining it...)
> >>
> >
> > Don't forget that some of these pages are localized.
>
> And there is that too which makes this option even more difficult to
> apply.
>
> >
> >
> >>
> >> 2) we might still want to see some application home pages in the
> >> search result and most of them should really not be modified
> >>
> >> 3.a) will still have the "what should I do" effect sometime for
pages
> >> that user is allowed to modify
> >>
> >> 3.b) has my preference right now, sounds like the nicest from user and
> >> author point of view, can even be used for other use cases than edit
> >> protection control
> >>
> >
> > Not sure how hard would be technically, but instead of an exception
> list, I
> > would like an inclusion list.
>
> Since 90% of the pages coming from extensions ares stuff nobody should
> touch I really don't think this is a good idea.
>
> > We talked so much in the past about Application Descriptor and we also
> have
> > some patterns put in place, like placing the code inside a Code space
> and
> > mark the technical pages hidden.
> >
> > I believe all the content pages of an application should be editable by
> > user and should be ignored during an upgrade, but all the technical /
> code
> > pages should not be encouraged to edit and they will need to be
> upgraded on
> > new releases.
> >
> > Instead of marking what pages should be ignored, we should mark what
> pages
> > we should upgrade and restrict from editing, thus defining the
> > application's structure and descriptor.
> >
> > The only downside with this approach is that it's more work to do, since
> > there are fewer 'content' (some Homepages, some demo content) pages
> inside
> > our applications, than the technical pages.
> >
> > Also if we were to go into the application description direction we
> might
> > want to move the pages in a nested structure, enforcing the rules we
> have
> > on application structure. But this might mean a lot of work and we need
> to
> > be convinced of the benefits.
> >
>
> > Also this goes beyond editing and also we would want to warn on other
> > operations, like move, delete. Marking what pages are ok to Edit, would
> not
> > provide us information if that page is ok to move and thus won't break
> the
> > application.
>
> Actually 3.b support well all that since the whole point is to
> indicate what kind of page it is (the page need to exist but can be
> modified, the page can be deleted, the page should never be modified,
> etc.). Default being "nobody should touch this page in any way" since
> that's what we want for most pages.
>
> >
> > Thomas also talked about a preference in the User Profile that would
> allow
> > editing and won't display the warning, intended for developers to ease
> > their work. This is one aspect to consider, the other is if we want
> special
> > permissions for some users, like administrators.
>
> This is a different subject IMO.
>
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Caty
> >
> >
> >>
> >> --
> >> Thomas Mortagne
> >>
>
>
>
> --
> Thomas Mortagne
>