State of support of the Colibri skin

Development
1

Hi!
This post was prompted by this discussion we had recently on a PR.

Colibri Skin has been developed in version 2.0 (Sep 2009) and used as a default Skin until version 6.2 (Sep 2014), when it was replaced by Flamingo Skin.

Support for Colibri was maintained until XE 6.4.x and the skin was retired in 8.0.

From the colibri archive readme.
Colibri extension documentation.

  1. I can’t find in the doc any written relation between deprecated and retired. From what I understand, every retired module is also deprecated. Is this right?
  2. Is it alright to explicitely break compatibility with Colibri as of today? We didn’t test anything on it in the past 10 years (we probably broke compatibility in tens of places since then), but there’s still plenty of CSS in our xwiki-platform codebase only to make Colibri work well. The best solution would be to move all this CSS somewhere in the Colibri module, but it’s archived, so it doesn’t really make sense to update it either AFAIU.

Thanks in advance for your help on those two questions!

Lucas C.

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I don’t remember ever discussing officially the meaning of the term “retired”. In this specific case, it seems to just express the fact that it was removed from xwiki-platform (and moved to contrib).

I don’t see much point in keeping Colibri skin specific code (but sometimes some code is commented as being for Colibri, but it’s then been used for other purposes so it’s not always easy to remove existing code like this), the Colibri skin is most probably quite broken on recent XWiki versions.

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Retired means not supported anymore by the core dev team. Deprecated usually means that it should no longer be used but it’s still supported.

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Yes it’s alright IMO. If the colibri skin is still in contrib then it should be moved to the attic (didn’t check where it is).

Also note that we’ve said in the past that the core dev team should not support more than 1 skin as it’s very costly to support.

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In a lot of places, I could notice that CSS uses classes with colibri- inside. Those should be pretty safe to remove. But for generic class names, I agree that we should still be careful.
E.g. selectors starting with .skin-colibri should be safe to remove :slight_smile:

Okay, thank you for the clarification, I updated doc with this info :+1:
https://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/DevelopmentPractices?viewer=changes&rev1=236.1&rev2=237.1&

It’s in the attic since 2014 :slight_smile:

Thanks for the info :slight_smile: I never found it on the doc so I’m adding it on AdminGuide → Skins (AFAICS there’s no skin doc for devs).

https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Documentation/AdminGuide/Skins?viewer=changes&rev1=41.3&rev2=42.1&

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Note that I find it better to say that all modules in the XWiki Attic are not supported (this is basically the definition of XWiki Attic).

I’ve kept your info box even if for me there’s no need to mention anything since it’s the def of XWiki Attic. The current definition at XWiki Attic · GitHub is: Abandoned projects kept as archives or until someone wants to resurrect a project (and move it back to https://github.com/xwiki-contrib).

Thx for adding it but I’d remove it because:

  1. It’s not the right place, the admin guide is for xwiki admins while this info is for the developers of XWiki (so dev.xwiki.org). If users want to see what XWiki core dev support, there’s a page: https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Support
  2. This has not been voted and it’s not something I’d vote for since there can be reasons to want to have 2 skins developed at the same time (e.g Cristal skin and Flamingo skin). We could still add it but I don’t see the value. If someone wants to code a new default skin in XS, there will be a proposal sent and it’ll be discussed.

Thx

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