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The bulk of EasyTimeline is an external Perl program; to check for the existence
of links it would have to communicate back to PHP. This could be done over
stdin/stdout, perhaps.

Assigned to extension developer.

*** Bug 5 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[ Assignee reseted by timeout. Marking the bug as easy. ]

This isn't easy. The timelines are generated by a 4000-line perl script, which doesn't communicate with MW apart from taking command-line arguments, so it has no way of knowing whether those pages exist.

To fix this, we'd have to implement either interprocess communication between these two, or some sort of two-phase processing.

May be the two phase processing with a link post-processing would do the trick and would be easily generalized

(In reply to comment #5)
> This isn't easy. The timelines are generated by a 4000-line perl script,
> which doesn't communicate with MW apart from taking command-line arguments, so
> it has no way of knowing whether those pages exist.

Out of curiosity, can you estimate how much time would be required to rewrite this script in PHP? Ten hours? Fifty hours?

And somewhat tangentially: would a rewritten script in PHP help resolve this bug?

(In reply to comment #7)
> Out of curiosity, can you estimate how much time would be required to rewrite
> this script in PHP? Ten hours? Fifty hours?

A man-week or two seems reasonable, but I don't really know the extension well enough to judge this accurately. It also depends on how much rewriting you wanna do (one could try to get rid of the [[Ploticus]] program it uses).


> And somewhat tangentially: would a rewritten script in PHP help resolve this
> bug?

It would at least avoid the issues I outlined in comment 5.

Change 130027 had a related patch set uploaded by Gerrit Patch Uploader:
Make broken wikilinks in timelines red

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/130027