Add the extended tagcloud contrib macro as a feature of the platform tagcloud along with XWIKI-20527

Development
#1

Hello all,

@cdesableau has worked on an improvement of the tag cloud for the platform, Loading..., and made a pull request for it as well as a contrib extension GitHub - xwiki-contrib/macro-extendedtagcloud: Extends the tagcloud macro from XWiki Platform to allow limiting the number of tags displayed which allows to overwrite the tagcloud macro with the improvement for the versions of XWiki prior to the fix version of XWIKI-20527 .

We are now looking at finding a proper strategy to handle the upgrade from versions pre-XWIKI-20527 to versions post-XWIKI-20527, from the point of view of installed extensions.

One possibility for that (and the simplest) is to have the macro-extendedtagcloud extension be marked as a feature of the platform tagcloud starting with the fix version of XWIKI-20527. This way, the users that have installed macro-extendedtagcloud and upgrade to a newer version will see the contrib extension be automatically uninstalled (as a platform module replaces it).

Do you agree to add this feature to the platform tagcloud?

Note: for me this is blocking the release of version 1.0 of the macro-extendedtagcloud, if we don’t have a proper strategy to prevent it from being installed along with XWIKI-20527 I prefer to avoid releasing it to not create extensions mess.

Thanks,
Anca

#2

If this means changing a platform pom.xml to add a dep on a contrib extension that is not managed by the core devs, I’m not sure we should do this. At least it would be a precedent and it feels weirdish. Especially as it doesn’t fix any important blocker bug. I don’t think it’s the good general solution for any contrib extension that need to disappear when XS is upgraded. If we don’t support this feature, it could be interesting to create a jira for it (for the future since it wouldn’t help you).

How much of a problem would that be for you? I don’t want to cause more problems for you (while at the same time trying to maintain a consistency for the platform). Note that I think it could be acceptable to add XWIKI-20527 to 14.10.x as an exception (but that probably doesn’t help you that much).

What do others think?

#3

Hello Vincent, thanks for the answer.

The extension mess is not a problem for me specifically, it just may create “unclean” situations that may require fixing.

Not releasing the extendedtagcloud extension is really not an issue for me, I can keep the fix on my instance as a custom change and then I’ll just drop it when upgrading to a version post XWIKI-20527. I just wanted to contribute this fix also for versions before, for whoever may need it, but it’s really not such a big deal, and on my side I don’t need it to be a released contrib extension.
It doesn’t need to be pushed to 14.10 either, it’s a small customization that I can keep as such.

Let’s not release this for versions before XWIKI-20527, it’s fine.