1292619 - Reduce impact of page topic move that will fail on subpages

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Wiki pages, enhancement, P3)

Description

[John Whitlock [:jwhitlock]]

What problem would this feature solve?
======================================
When moving an MDN topic page (one that has a tree of child changes under it), the move will fail if a "leaf" node will collide with an existing page. 

Who has this problem?
=====================
Core contributors to MDN

How do you know that the users identified above have this problem?
==================================================================
While dealing with bug 1279908, several page moves failed.  One attempt was to move:

/fr/docs/Mozilla/Firefox_OS

to

/fr/docs/Mozilla/B2G_OS

but there were some existing pages that blocked the move, starting at:

/fr/docs/Mozilla/B2G_OS/Board_guide/CHIRIMEN

The page move failed. The algorithm is a recursive one that moves pages starting at the top of the topic tree and working it's way down, inside a transaction. When a collision is found, the transaction is rolled back. However, there are a set of page re-renders scheduled for the in-transaction pages, which result in a cascade of async task errors.

How are the users identified above solving this problem now?
============================================================
1) Attempt a page move
2) Get an email that the page move failed. Forward the email to developers or open a bug
3) Developers get traceback messages, New Relic alerts, etc., and file an incident report.
4) Manual steps are taken to handle the collision and attempt the page move again.

Do you have any suggestions for solving the problem? Please explain in detail.
==============================================================================
The page move could be done in "dry" mode, where it attempts to discover collisions before opening the transaction and moving pages.  The page move requester could be notified of collisions before the page move begins.

Is there anything else we should know?
======================================

Comment 1

[BMO Automation]

MDN Web Docs' bug reporting has now moved to GitHub. From now on, please file content bugs at https://github.com/mdn/sprints/issues/ and platform bugs at https://github.com/mdn/kuma/issues/.