Modules:Proposal

This is a proposal for unifying the Module Owners List and the associated Activities Module Owners List, and making them easier to maintain and so more likely to be up-to-date.

At the moment, the Module Owners list is automatically generated from despot, our system for controlling access to the CVS repository we no longer use. Because editing despot is painful and only a few busy people have the necessary permissions, the list has had a tendency to get out of date, with "big bang" updates every few years when the pain of inaccuracy gets too great.

In this proposal, I am attempting to strike a balance between easy updateability (vital if the list is to remain current) and reliability (i.e. it can't be corrupted by the unscrupulous or vandals). Other useful properties we are aiming for include:

• extensibility (ability to add new fields)
• machine-parseability (e.g. for stale review reminders)

The idea is basically this:

• An editable copy of the list is maintained on a wiki.
• A definitive copy of the list, to which people should link, is maintained on mozilla.org.
• At regular intervals, changes to the editable copy since the last sync are reviewed, and the data copied across.

The editing process could be done by anyone with a wiki account. It uses two MediaWiki templates (Code_Module, Activities_Module) so that the markup in the editable copy is simply, understandable and hopefully machine-parseable. This also follows the principle of DRY.

The review process would be done by the owner or a peer of the Module Ownership System module. It would involve looking at a MediaWiki-generated diff of the current page against the last time it was copied, reviewing the changes, and signing off on a particular revision. If any change is suspect, MediaWiki history can show who made it and enquiries can be made.

The copying process would be done by a script, which would take the revision number of the known-good revision, download the markup generated by MediaWiki when displaying that revision as normal HTML, and place it in the middle of the definitive copy, with a comment saying which revision number it was taken from.