Last modified: 2010-05-15 15:48:20 UTC
I have discovered a number of bugs in the $wgUseMetadataEdit code: - "show changes" on the edit page does not include the metadata - metadata edits can be lost or misordered during section edits - the current code will simply stuff the new/edited metadata into the end of the section being edited, while leaving any existing metadata at the end of the article. - the parser that extracts metadata appears to have a condition that can cause the loss of content from previous revisions. - i did not actually experience this bug, but in trying to understand how the parser works, i discovered that it sometimes fails to un-explode the content, which could in theory replace text with "Array" in the articles. Look for the "$y = implode("]]", $y)" on line 70 of my patch. - metadata ordering can change between normal edits, which makes history diffs messy. 1. edit the page. add a new whitelist metadata field to the normal textbox. save the page. Note in the source of the new revision that your metadata is still in the middle of the article content. 2. edit the page again. add some new content in the normal textbox. save the page. Note that the source of the new revision now has the metadata from step 1 located at the end of the text, rather than in the middle of it. I believe that I have fixed these bugs, and I will attach the patch in a moment. The patch also includes two new hooks, which allow an extension to replace both the metadata parser and the metadata textbox on the EditPage. I believe that this patch will have zero impact on any installations that are not using $wgUseMetaDataEdit.
Created attachment 3143 [details] Patch for metadataedit bugs
hashar on freenode #mediawiki made some comments about removing this code from the mediawiki core entirely, and moving it into an extension. I suppose this makes sense, since I can't imagine that any major mediawiki installations are using this anyway, given the bugs in it. If this is preferable, I can put together a patch that removes all of this code and replaces it with a handful of hooks, and then create a basic extension that provides the same functionality. This would actually be preferable to me, as I am already building another extension that provides more advanced metadata editing functionality, and this would greatly improve the modularity/integration of that extension as well.
Created attachment 3150 [details] second rev of patch for metaedit bugs There was still a section editing bug in the previous patch.
per a freenode discussion with brion, I will prepare a patch that removes all metadata edit code from the core, and an extension that replicates the functionality (with the bugs fixed, I hope). In the meantime, I am taking ownership of this bug so that it doesn't clutter other people's lists.
Moved the code to the "MetadataEdit" extension in r62740. I am closing this bug as FIXED and I just created bug 22594 in "MediaWiki extensions" product for the bugs you pointed out in comment #0 ("show changes on the edit page does not include the metadata" was fixed in r62740 though). Please provide a new patch for the fixes against the extension if you can.
