amberwolf said:
FWIW, stuff like that is why I would never work on the "live" forum, but only on a copy, then when it was verified by at least several different people (with different workflows, viewpoints, methods, etc) to work without breaking stuff, *then* I'd apply the same stuff to the "live" forum.
You gotta understand that making a copy of our database takes 5 hours per change you need to test for, alone. Then it requires a ~1 hour check of the site functionality at a minimum, maybe longer. I have found you can't cut corners on this time sucker by occasionally skipping the data copy process, either, due to the wide range of unexpected side effects in phpbb's code and data storage techniques.
Meanwhile, installing a plugin takes about 1-2 minutes. Pretty tempting, isn't it? Cleaning up a mess it makes takes anywhere from minutes to hours. Whereas testing takes a minimum of 5 hours, up to about 7. Testing also does not guarantee that you find all the problems. You may find them months into the future.
I'm aware this is not the ideal way to do this, but as you can see, the time economics are hugely slanted.
I have been trying to tackle the ES development problem since i took over in 2015. Of the perhaps 100 hours spent on working on ES, around 60 have been spent trying to make testing faster. I even went so far as to write something faster than Oracle's mysqldump in the process of trying to speed up database operations, which are the primary bottleneck to testing. That's how desperate i was.
I have a faster way to refresh a testing environment quickly with our next setup; it's something i discovered working with a client recently. So does Gammaray. Between these two ideas, i believe one will land. We haven't invested in this in our current setup as phpbb is not worth investing in, generally.
If you would like to volunteer to do testing, you could ensure this is done up to your standards. It is the most dull and un-gratifying job to most, so i've never asked anyone to help with it. How do you feel about doing some of this work?
amberwolf said:
I have no idea how practical this is...but even though it would be a bit more time-consuming initially, it would certainly save heartaches and headaches like this one.
Actually the heartbreak to reward ratio on this one is well worth it because i will have to fix youtube embeds anyway. There's 5 different ways our system has done youtube embeds over time, and they all have to transformed before moving to a new platform. This changes my order of operation more than anything else.