$wgTitle is by far the most evil global we have. It needs to go away. It constantly gets in the way of doing things properly, and people use it not knowing how bad it is.
Suggest we make killing this a higher priority. Other globals are bad too, but this one is really really bad.
tisane2718 wrote:
Before getting rid of $wgTitle, hooks such as AlternateEdit and ParserBeforeStrip should be modified to provide a $title parameter. The manual page on $wgTitle clearly warns about the problems with that global, but sometimes there's no alternative to using it, the way hooks are currently set up.
ParserBeforeStrip is passed a $parser parameter, so you can grab the title with $parser->getTitle() . Similarly, you can use $ep->getArticle()->getTitle() in AlternateEdit.
Looks like from the API's pov, we can just nuke all the "usages" when they've been removed elsewhere etc.
We're just keeping some crappy compatibility by assigning wgTitle to the one we're currently abusing
The situation is even more grave than I thought, adding the following to parserTests.php indicates that even Parser is dependant on it:
class DummyTitle {
public function __call( $name, $args ) {
throw new MWException( "\$wgTitle::$name() called" );
}
}
$wgTitle = new DummyTitle()
Bryan.TongMinh wrote:
I was looking into this, and it appears that the main culprit is wfMsgExt( $msg, 'parsemag' ), which calls MessageCache::transform and in turn Parser::transformMsg. The way to fix this is to pass a $title object along the entire wfMsg chain.
I used the following code to find out what is calling $wgTitle:
class wgTitleStub extends StubObject {
function __construct( $title ) {
$this->title = $title; parent::__construct( 'wgTitle' );
}
function _newObject() {
return $this->title;
}
function _unstub( $name = '_unstub', $level = 2 ) {
parent::_unstub( $name, $level );
$bt = array();
foreach ( wfDebugBacktrace() as $line ) {
if ( isset( $line['class'] ) ) {
$bt[] = "{$line['class']}::{$line['function']}";
} else {
$bt[] = $line['function'];
}
}
wfDebug('Full $wgTitle unstub backtrace: ' . implode( ', ', $bt ) . "\n" );}
}
Then in Wiki::performRequestForTitle() remove the pass by reference from the function arguments and set $GLOBALS['wgTitle'] = new wgTitleStub( $title );
(In reply to comment #7)
changed bug title to be less offending.
$wgTitle deserves every bit of it, IMO :)
(In reply to comment #8)
(In reply to comment #7)
changed bug title to be less offending.
$wgTitle deserves every bit of it, IMO :)
Adjusted again.
116 usages in phase3...
Quite a few seem to be back compat setting a value, and/or documentation
LanguageConverter probably wants contextsourcing
See bug 53498 comment 10 for a very nasty bug caused by the usage of $wgTitle in AbuseFilter code
Chad is doing a good job in fixing some of them lately ;)
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/status:open+topic:wgTitle-ugh,n,z
Change 263029 had a related patch set uploaded (by TTO):
DynamicPageListHooks: Set parser context title
Change 263030 had a related patch set uploaded (by TTO):
Remove some uses of $wgTitle in core
The following extensions in git reference $wgTitle at least once in their source code (WMF-deployed extensions marked with *):
* AbuseFilter AJAXPoll ApprovedRevs AuthorProtect BlueSpiceExtensions BlueSpiceFoundation Cargo DataTransfer DumpHTML ErrorHandler ExtTab GoogleMaps JSBreadCrumbs Lingo * LiquidThreads MaintenanceShell MassEditRegex MultiBoilerplate OfflineImportLexicon PageDisqus PageSchemas * ProofreadPage Push RandomFeaturedUser * SecurePoll SelectCategory * SemanticForms SemanticMaps * SemanticMediaWiki SemanticPageMaker * SemanticResultFormats ShoutWikiAds SimpleSecurity SocialProfile StarterWiki * Validator * VisualEditor * Wikibase * WikibaseQueryEngine * Wikidata WikiLexicalData Wikilog WikiObjectModel WYSIWYG
A couple of non-deployed skins use it as well.
Of the deployed extensions that use it, some only assign to it, and never read from it (except for null checks and the like):
Other deployed extensions actually use its value, and need to be patched:
As usual, SMW is a big offender here.
Change 263030 abandoned by Krinkle:
Remove some uses of $wgTitle in core
Reason:
All uses in core seem to've been updated in master. Thanks anyway!
Change 938919 had a related patch set uploaded (by Mainframe98; author: Mainframe98):
[mediawiki/core@master] parser: Plug gaps in nullability of Parser::mTitle
Change 938877 had a related patch set uploaded (by Mainframe98; author: Mainframe98):
[mediawiki/core@master] API: Do not initialize $wgTitle to a bad title anymore
Change 938857 had a related patch set uploaded (by Mainframe98; author: Mainframe98):
[mediawiki/core@master] Remove remaining usages of $wgTitle and deprecate it
Just to confirm: the wgTitle JavaScript config value is completely unrelated, and there is no plan to deprecate it ever, right?
Yes. That's just a string of the current page title and unrelated to this work. Maybe it should be renamed, but that's totally outside of this scope.