[pmwiki-users] Testing and quality control (Was: Pre-announcing 2.2.0 non-beta release)

[Petko Yotov]

On Wednesday 21 January 2009 10:08:54 Christian Ridderström wrote:
> So, something that I think would help is setting up separate public areas
> for the testing of different recipes. These areas could be a wiki groups
> or separate wikis and the purpose of being separate is to avoid
> interference between recipes. The public aspect mean that many people can
> contribute with the testing.
...
> The drawback with the scheme above is that it'll require at least a little
> bit more involvement by e.g. Petko in terms of setting up the testing
> area.

I don't feel we should do this on PmWiki.org, even in separate groups or wiki 
fields. Wiki fields are not hardcore separated or sandboxed, a broken recipe 
is able to corrupt many things, everything that is in the home directory of 
the running process.

I have physically not enough time to review, test and evaluate (security, 
quality) complex recipes like ZAP, Fox and WikiSh which allow extremely 
diverse combinations of features and sub-plugins, and do write to files and 
wiki pages. Like Eemeli once said, if I need a feature, I'll write my own 
recipe faster than reviewing an existing one and adapt it for my needs.

On pmwiki.org (or on my own sites), I only enable recipes that are smaller and 
simpler, whose code I've had the time to read and test, and where no problems 
appeared possible to me.

For this reason, I strongly suggest that cookbook authors place links in the 
Recipe page to their Demonstration areas on their own wikis, with edit 
sandboxes to let the readers test the features. I do it for my recipes.

Thanks,
Petko