772704 - When a template is updated, the pages including this template should be regenerated

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: KumaScript, enhancement)

Description

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

This one came in from the community, and no information was provided aside from this one line. Wondering if Les could comment on it...

Comment 1

[Louis-Rémi BABE]

I am the one who reported that bug, I can provide more info if required.
I'm available on IRC as lrbabe.

Comment 2

[Louis-Rémi BABE]

Oops, I'm actually louisremi on IRC.

Comment 3

[Luke Crouch [:groovecoder]]

Good idea. Discussing in #mdndev too. Will report back here with ideas and priority.

Comment 4

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

I would say very high priority after launch. Any other thoughts?

Comment 5

[Les Orchard [:lorchard]]

This requires bug 767176 to track template / document dependencies, and will not be a simple or quick feature to implement.

Comment 7

[Les Orchard [:lorchard]]

Copying over teoli's comment from bug 782114:

When we modify a template, we have to manually do a shift-reload to see the change taken into account by the pages using this template.

This is annoying for three reasons:
1) We don't have the list of which pages use it (that's bug 773855 )
2) There may be 100s of them... Updating manually is not practical.
3) Some kumascript are used as a simple DB, meaning that some articles will be outdated and un-synchronized (read: incoherent info provided to the user).

Note: no need to have them updated synchronously when we check-in a change in the template. There is no problem having to wait up to 10 minutes to have all pages updated.

Priority: though not a P0, I believe this one is quite important (P1 or at least P2). Little by little, more pages are not up-to-date.

To mitigate the problem we could regenerate all pages periodically (once a week?), like we did right after the launch. Doing this would push the priority from P1 to P2 or even P3.

Comment 8

[Wladimir Palant]

Note that this might need to be done recursively. Current example: sheppy updated https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Template:DekiScript:Web to make https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Template:Fx_minversion_header work correctly (previously it would generate links with spaces in them). So all pages using Fx_minversion_header and the like need to be updated even though they don't use the DekiScript:Web directly. Detecting which templates use it might be tricky however.

Comment 9

[Les Orchard [:lorchard]]

(In reply to Wladimir Palant from comment #8)
> Note that this might need to be done recursively. 

Yeah, that's hinted at over here in the bug to inventory page/template relationships:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=767176#c4

Comment 10

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

This continues to gradually result in pages being increasingly out of whack. I'd like to see us do something with this sooner rather than later.

Comment 11

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

I agree. Sheppy, can you mention this one the next time we discuss priorities on mdn-drivers@? Or even now if you want.

Comment 12

[Les Orchard [:lorchard]]

Just to be clear: This bug has a blocker. So, if we want this feature built, we can't just throw it onto the board. There's lots of infrastructure to build behind it, first.

Comment 13

[Jean-Yves Perrier [:teoli]]

Could you fill a bug for the blocker and make it blocking this bug?

Comment 14

[Les Orchard [:lorchard]]

(In reply to Jean-Yves Perrier [:teoli] from comment #13)
> Could you fill a bug for the blocker and make it blocking this bug?

But... there's already a blocker. It's bug 767176, listed up there at the top as "Depends on"

Comment 15

[Jean-Yves Perrier [:teoli]]

Les: sorry, misread it ;-)

Comment 16

[John Whitlock [:jwhitlock]]

Les mentioned a full refresh as an option in comment #c7. I've broken out that idea as bug 1365987.

Comment 17

[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/.