2016 06_Meeting_IRC_Log

– ibennetch has joined the room
ibennetch:  Hello
AlecT:  Hey
ibennetch:  Thanks for joining us. I look forward to hearing from you about the wiki.
ibennetch:  The monthly developer meeting will begin in about two minutes. The meeting will be logged and posted to the wiki.
AlecT:  Great.
ibennetch:  I will be on mobile for the next 10 minutes or so, which means my responses will probably be slow and full of typos :-)
AlecT:  Can I bring up some other things as well?
AlecT:  Or have I somehow committed myself to the wiki thing and only that?
nijel:  Hello everybody,  I think we should wait a bit to see if other team members will join as well.
– DevenB has joined the room
ibennetch:  I agree about waiting, plus it will give me a chance to get to a full size keyboard.
nijel:  Hi DevenB
DevenB:  Hi nijel
ibennetch:  Normally we would only deal with topics that are on the agenda, but since you took the time to join us and since the agenda is rather light this month, I don't have a problem with adding extra topics.
– HerculeP has disconnected (Read error: Connection reset by peer)
AlecT:  Yes, I am sorry it's short notice, I've been meaning to be more active and keep up with things since I joined the mailing list, PMA has always been my backup tool and I've never seen anything I could do (in enough time to say "hey I could do that!" as I don't know my way around the project). I'm still using the MySQL GUI tools you see. 
nijel:  DevenB: we're currently waiting if somebody else will join as well, I think we can wait 5 more minutes to give ibennetch chance to have real keyboard  ;-)
ibennetch:  i think it's important to hear from our users so your thoughts are welcome here.
DevenB:  Sure. We can wait. It's no problem :-)
ibennetch:  Maybe we should begin. I'd like to hear from AlecT about the problems with the github wiki.
ibennetch:  Is there a particular reason you don't like the github one?
AlecT:  Hello, I'll start by saying: I don't actually like MediaWiki that much, it's quite bloated and it's a big bit of software, so please don't think of me as member of some sort of mediawiki cult. "" for Wikipedia, however Mediawiki is great at it's job, and the github "wiki" thing is terrible at it's job.
AlecT:  Github provides these narrow pages with poor contrast, and it's little more than rendered markup with a history. As such you can't categorise pages, you can't redirect, you can't use templates, and a whole bunch of other things. You can live without these, but you can use SQL without ever touching a join, life is definitely better with joins.
ibennetch:  I rather agree that github is awful, but it has some good features like the git integration
AlecT:  Wikis don't have a problem with version control anyway, that's one of their strengths (I'm sure you know this of course) I think we can call that a draw.
nijel:  It's not about version control, it's about ability to clone the wiki and work on that locally. That makes many things way easier than on Mediawiki.
AlecT:  Well that's traditionally been solved with sandboxes. Also IME clashes are rare.
AlecT:  Are you getting at an offline version of the wiki? I don't think there's much of a gain by doing that, PMA has it's own documentation with it, you can always save web-pages, so forth.
DevenB:  I agree with nijel. I have found it simpler to use, than editing the text boxes on webpages. But that's a personal preference of course. 
nijel:  Sandboxing indeed helps in some cases, but there things which are way simpler to do on set of files than using web interface (mass deletion of spam was most frequent thing which I hate on Mediawiki).
ibennetch:  I agree with nijel that I like to work in my own editor. But there may be a way to do that with media wiki.
AlecT:  nijel do you have the "nuke" extension installed? Also I promise you I can fix the spam thing. The nuke extension is packaged with mediawiki by default for as long as I can remember.
AlecT:  ibennetch: it has a live preview thing in the latest version, it's always had show preview, there's also "edit section" so you don't have to edit the entire page. My main wiki is one for mathematics, and I really do just fine, LaTeX expressions require a lot of "check to see if it looks okay"
ibennetch:  I'm not familiar with Nuke, what's that used for?
nijel:  Yes, there are probably extensions for many things (except for OAuth2 which I'd like to see), that just makes the maintenance harder
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nijel:  (of course not that much if the extension is included, but that is my experience from past and downloading extensions separately)
AlecT:  ibennetch: the nuke extension is for when you get attacked by spambots, you can delete all pages by a user, or the last 500 pages in 2 clicks.
bennetch:  ah, nice.
– ibennetch has disconnected (Quit: Colloquy for iPhone - https://colloquy.mobi)
– bennetch is now known as ibennetch
AlecT:  nijel: when you're installing Mediawiki you should have been presented with a bunch of tickboxes about extensions to enable by default, if there's no special:nuke or something at the bottom of special pages, you didn't tick it, it might even be just commented out in the config file.
AlecT:  (Special:Nuke, shows at bottom of special pages as "Mass Delete" - in bold as it's a sysop only page)
ibennetch:  I have no problem with mediawiki outright, but the two big features we are looking for are OAuth authentication and the ability to edit files offline.
nijel:  AlecT: our Mediawiki was installed ages ago, so there was probably nothing like this selection in that time...
ibennetch:  I haven't found much about OAuth for Mediawiki, everything is about using mediawiki users to authenticate to other services which is the opposite of what we want.
AlecT:  nijel: spam was a problem years ago, but either way, I assure you I could fix it or help you fix it, and that it can be done. Also you can update (might have to be done in steps due to the age) I recommend going no further than 1.24.something as they removed some useful things
ibennetch:  I'm pretty indifferent about this.
ibennetch:  I'm working on some scripts to help make Github wiki better (faking categories, etc)
ibennetch:  But I'd rather have that built in to the wiki itself than have to script a solution.
AlecT:  Also you wont get templates and stuff, Templates are really really useful. 
ibennetch:  But I like the offline access we get with github wiki.
nijel:  AlecT: so you suggest to install no longer supported version? I don't think I want to go this way...
AlecT:  Well saving pages has always worked and also I don't think I've ever wanted to use a wiki offline, that's usually the point, also when I download PMA, I'd be surprised if a bunch of markup text files came with it.
AlecT:  nijel: there's an LTS version somewhere around there.
ibennetch:  I didn't find any better self-hosted wiki solution than Mediawiki, either.
DevenB:  It seems now that I had proposed the idea to migrate without properly researching about better things in Mediawiki/other options. I had read in some conversations about the spam we are/were facing and the other issue I wanted to point out was of the stale content. 
AlecT:  Once you get to know Mediawiki it's really good at its job. It took me a few months to really get to grips with it, it's also pretty much idiot proof, as Wikipedia shows (I can't imagine the philosophy or classics section are from particularly technically minded people  )
AlecT:  Okay so on the state of content, Mediawiki provides some nice solutions, what I do is I have a template, like {{Stub page|grade=A|msg=Content needs fleshing out}} or something, and that categorises the page and all that for me. This means I have a category with all the grade A pages, which is nice. I also patrol sections.
nijel:  Mediawiki is probably really great, the thing is that we've not used most of it's features anyway, so the only things we miss are categories and search. There were some redirects, but I think that's really not important feature...
AlecT:  To patrol I invoke a plugin's command (called Category Tree or something) to dump a list of pages in a category, and I mark them off on the list when I've patrolled their content. You've also got a list that orders pages by their last update.
AlecT:  Well hopefully I can get you using it properly. It's ... believe me I hate to say this, really good at it's job. I really dislike the github wiki, it's harder to find stuff in (mediawki lets you do a lot more style-wise)
ibennetch:  For me, styling is the worst part of the github wiki. The pages are bland and as you wrote earlier, there's not a whole lot of page space for content.
AlecT:  Exactly.
AlecT:  I dread to think what a code example would look like on it. (BTW Mediawiki supports pretty good syntax highlighting through a stock extension called Geshi or something, Genshi... not sure, you do <source lang="whatever">[code here]</source> and you're done.
AlecT:  I've also got some nice templates, one is called method and provides a nice highlighted method signature, and you can link parts of it to different pages (that document the type)
nijel:  I agree that the styling is limited...
nijel:  on the other side the syntax highlighting is on GitHub as well
AlecT:  Great, it's a tie.
ibennetch:  Well we need to move the meeting along. This isn't an easy problem to resolve so I'm not sure how to decide what's best here.
nijel:  What I think is that Mediawiki has way more features we will ever use. It indeed has several more which we will use, but lacks some integration I'd personally like to see...
AlecT:  How do we proceed? I'm willing to commit and help, but I would be annoyed if this time next month you're like "lol github wiki it is" and that effort goes to waste.
DevenB:  Actually the point about page spaces is true. I have tried to read the IRC logs on it and within a few minutes, it was clear that I will read them only after cloning it locally... But still I have seen orgs using the github wiki in quite a good and meaningful way (though the links between pages and number of pages would obviously be very different for them)
ibennetch:  That is very true -- mediawiki has many more features than we need. I wonder if a different wiki platform has better offline tools (since Mediawiki took away the external editor feature)
AlecT:  Also if I am to become more active in the programming part of it, I'll need to learn a lot of what would be useful wiki content, it'd make sense to do it as I went a long.
ibennetch:  I wouldn't want AlecT to start working on something that we're not committed to using; if we decide to use Mediawiki then you can do the work to improve it but I wouldn't want to see effort wasted.
ibennetch:  Were there other issues you wanted to bring up, AlecT ?
nijel:  Anyway I don't think we can take the decision now, I don't think anybody of us (besides AlecT :-))  is decided about best approach right now.
AlecT:  Yes, but I would like someone to get back to me about mediawiki, I'm more than willing to help nijel (the main admin there) to fix the current issues, even do the updating (given a copy of the DB and the files, so I can do a dry run of course)
AlecT:  Now as for the other things!
AlecT:  As I mentioned before I'm trying to wean myself off the MySQL GUI tools, as they've been EOL for 7 years. I want to use PMA instead, now there are some great things there, but there's some half-baked things that are quite buggy too. 
ibennetch:  Let's continue to discuss the wiki on the mailing list, with a goal to vote on a decision in a week.
AlecT:  For example, earlier I ticked the profiling box, it didn't work on a view with a user defined function involved (it turns out any query with a user defined function doesn't work)
ibennetch:  I believe you opened two issues about profiling recently, which is very helpful.
AlecT:  Later in that same session I went to export a table and I got a fatal error from PHP. It was because profiling was on (I can tell you what file later)
nijel:  I think such things are better to discuss in the issue tracker...
AlecT:  Now half-baked things, the cool graphs you have! They're great, now the GUI tools have this nice syntax ^[variable] for rate and such, I had expected that, my main problem is that the changes (deltas) are not divided by the change in time, so you get this useless thing.
AlecT:  Rather than "things per unit time"
AlecT:  Oh okay.
nijel:  we try to discuss things that need some kind of decision on the meetings, not really just bug reports
ibennetch:  That makes it easier to track responsibility and progress on features/bugs
AlecT:  Ah okay, what I'm getting at is there are a lot of .... it's clear whoever wrote them was gunning to get a particular thing working rather than a generic feature. I'd really like to see some work on making the code more isolated (that profiling / export bug for example) and developing some of the features. Like ->
nijel:  So I suggest to continue with meeting agenda, next item is Controluser/replication socket connections/SSL
AlecT:  Sure.
ibennetch:  Your suggestions are great, we really do want to flesh out these features.
ibennetch:  The best way to track them is in the Issues tracker, then if we have follow up questions or discussion we can discuss it there so everyone is notified of the comments.
AlecT:  (Just want to shout out to the syntax highlighter, it's ... really good AT SOME THINGS, I could also help with that (parsers are my thing) but I'd like a contact I can pester when I need pointing in the right direction, I'll stop now and let you get back to the meeting)
ibennetch:  About the SSL, it seems the best path is to add all the SSL options for replication user and controluser. That just adds a lot of configuration directives.
nijel:  AlecT: parser was mostly written by Dan, so he is best contact person for that. I know some parts already as well...
AlecT:  We can talk later, now I know who you are on IRC
ibennetch:  I'm not sure whether we really want to add all those configuration directives, but I don't see any alternative.
– AndroUser has joined the room
ibennetch:  Any other thoughts about this?
nijel:  I think we should this really make generic, so that all connection settings would be accepted in other places as well.
AlecT:  For socket connections is that even a PMA issue? Surely that's a part of the MySQL driver?
ibennetch:  But nijel we added a feature to allow putting the configuration storage on another host, which I think was requested by a user who managed multiple servers and wanted one central pmadb location.
ibennetch:  So it at least has to be separate from the actual server we connect to (unless we remove that functionality).
nijel:  I mean that all server settings would be accepted for configuration storage as well (eg. socket becomes controlsocket and so on...).
– AndroUser is now known as madhuracj-mobile
ibennetch:  It's possible to have the configuration storage database on one host, connect to a second, and use replication on a third; all with different host, socket, and ssl settings.
ibennetch:  At least, that's sort of how we advertise it now with 'controlhost'
ibennetch:  I'm sorry, I'm having trouble following along. what config.inc.php settings do you suggest might work?
nijel:  The do not work right now, but I think we should extend the code to map all control* to connection settings in https://github.com/phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin/blob/master/libraries/common.inc.php#L756
ibennetch:  So in config.inc.php we could have 'controluser' and 'controlsocket' and so on?
ibennetch:  and 'control_connect_type'
nijel:  hello madhuracj-mobile, we're just discussing second point in agenda...
nijel:  ibennetch: yes, something like that 
ibennetch:  Same for replication, then, I suppose.
madhuracj-mobile:  Hello everyone
ibennetch:  Or some other way to configure ssl for replication user.
nijel:  probably, though that needs UI as well what makes it a bit more complex
nijel:  madhuracj-mobile: you're one hour late, but we're still not yet done ;-)
ibennetch:  Welcome madhuracj-mobile 
madhuracj-mobile:  Yeah, I have set the wrong time to the calendar event.
nijel:  ibennetch: I really don't see other way than to provide these options as SSL seems to be more widely used these days...
ibennetch:  Okay, as long as we agree to adding all the configuration directives for a controluser.
ibennetch:  I don't see any other way to do it, but hate adding all those new directives.
ibennetch:  Oh, well :-)
ibennetch:  Shall we wrap up or does everyone have a bit more time?
nijel:  I can continue
DevenB:  I am fine with half an hour more at least. 
madhuracj-mobile:  Fine with me as well
ibennetch:  Then we're on to the Lightning Round -- issues, pull requests, and so on.
ibennetch:  I've proposed a patch for the controluser ssl issue, which seems to work for me, but needs someone else to review it before merging.
nijel:  I've just posted my comment there :-)
ibennetch:  Cool, I'll look in to that.
ibennetch:  Next up is the pop out SQL window.
ibennetch:  Is there enough there to work with? Should we close it or leave it open for now?
nijel:  I think current code is not really useful and the pull request has not been updated for quite some time...
nijel:  so I suggest closing this for now.
ibennetch:  That's what I also thought.
ibennetch:  setcookie/getcookie
ibennetch:  Is this anything useful right now? One of the last comments is that without the matching PHP code it is rather useless, so I suspect we should close this as well.
nijel:  I agree to close this.
DevenB:  yes. plus it has not been updated since long and only has partial code as far as I think. I agree. 
ibennetch:  Okay, moving on
ibennetch:  ENUM editor adding extra blank spaces. Does this make sense?
madhuracj-mobile:  Looks like a bug and nees to be fixed.
ibennetch:  The editor defaults to 4 ENUM fields, if I fill in two and leave two blank it defines my enum like ('1','2','','')
ibennetch:  Okay, I'll look in to that as well.
ibennetch:  Any opinions about the favorite tables error?
nijel:  indeed ENUM looks like a bug
ibennetch:  No one was able to reproduce it. Can we close it?
DevenB:  I can understand what he means now today when I re-read it. 
ibennetch:  thanks nijel also
madhuracj-mobile:  Not worth fixing IMO.
nijel:  I think that I understood the problem here, but failed to reproduce it... The code handling it is quite straightforward...
DevenB:  He means that the notice should only be shown when the Favorites button is hovered upon. and not when the actual popup is hovered.
DevenB:  But that does not make much sense to me to fix as a bug. 
ibennetch:  Oh? Perhaps I misunderstood his report. Trying to reproduce now...
ibennetch:  No, I still don't see a problem here.
ibennetch:  So we agree to close the Favorites popup issue?
nijel:  Indeed the popup will not disappear if you are over it, but I don't think this is a bug...
nijel:  so yes, we can close this
DevenB:  yes. we can go ahead and close this.
ibennetch:  I think that's the expected behavior with any UI...unless I'm completely missing the point.
madhuracj-mobile:  Agreed to close this
ibennetch:  Finally the SSL issues. nijel added some code about this so maybe the issue is outdated now
ibennetch:  PHP documentation seems pretty clear about this but Michal was able to reproduce and fix some issues 
nijel:  I really don't understand the OpenSSL problem there. The code used in case of useOpenSSL returning false is pretty much same as ours
nijel:  The problem is that original reporter didn't really come back to the issue (I believe it was originally reported on the list)...
ibennetch:  It was on the mailing list, so we can send a reply there. He/she was pretty responsive on email after the initial report.
ibennetch:  Unless there's something else I think we can wind the meeting down.
nijel:  okay, let's try to get him involved in the issue tracker
nijel:  I also think we're done now
ibennetch:  Thanks everyone for the good discussion. We'll discuss the wiki on the mailing list and look to vote in about a week about a direction.
nijel:  thanks everybody for attending and see you in a month
DevenB:  Bye everyone. Thanks for attending. See you in the next meeting. :-)
madhuracj-mobile:  Bye.