We need to decide what to do about running PHP 7 and 8 in the same place. It causes lots of vendor/ and composer.lock changes, which cause the permission issues. Running phan with PHP 8 gives different results than CI so is not useful. Running docker-dev with PHP 7 is also not great.

Let's investigate and discuss first.

We learned from @ssastry that it's possible to preview the effect of our CSS changes by applying them as a file in the visual diffs tool, see for example https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/plugins/gitiles/integration/visualdiff/+/refs/heads/master/configs/parsoid_vs_core/parsoid.custom_styles.yaml

Ready for final review from WMDE Technical Wishes and WMF Content Transform.

After some dev discussion, we're thinking that the nicest balance would be a PHP variable like "community configuration defaults", which could be set up for eg. an entire project (wikinews, etc.) or for a third-party site, and would be respected as the default values for Community Configuration dialogs, or it would be used directly in the case the the extension is unavailable. Let's check with the Growth team about this.

Looking at actual eswiki and how we might safely change the rule, the following separate rules are applying to lower-alpha footnote markers in parsoid read mode, listed here in decreasing order of precedence:

Grabbing a typical example of these rules, eswiki has:

.mw-ref > a[data-mw-group=lower-alpha]::after {
    content: counter( mw-Ref, lower-alpha );
}

Global search for "mw-Ref" CSS rules that might apply to Parsoid footnote markers: https://global-search.toolforge.org/?q=%22mw-Ref%22&namespaces=8&title=.*css (111 results)

(needs to be split into subtasks)

Seems that the last patch is merged, moving to "done".

There was a conclusion to this task, but it still needs to be written about in the README. Run parsoid tests like this,

./modules/mediawiki/bin/mwscript tests/parser/parserTests.php --wiki=dev --file=/srv/docker-dev/mediawiki/extensions/Cite/tests/parser/citeParserTests.txt --filter 'Non-diffing' --parsoid

Okay, I found that it's actually the dependency on mediawiki.router which depends in turn on oojs. This module provides OO.Router and uses OO.Registry.

The ResourceLoader modules already attempt to do exactly this, and the only direct OOUI dependency in static mode is currently oojs-ui.styles.icons-media which was not supposed to pull in the entire bundle. +1 to switching to codex styles.

We've successfully demonstrated what we consider to be the highest-risk technical aspects: recursive wikitext parsing from the attribute text in Parsoid, and splitting the single main+details wikitext ref tag into two nodes which land as a subref and as a quasi-list-defined main ref, which concludes this investigation.

We worked on this today and found some partial answers: most importantly, it is possible for References.php to emit two reference nodes as it parses a main+details line of wikitext. Wiring the main and details content into the new refs will still take some work. One lower-risk question that was opened is, whether we can recursively parse the details wikitext into DOM nodes in this Parsoid context, but that seems likely because the parsoid API includes some methods for doing exactly this.

In T327396#10375715, @MoritzMuehlenhoff wrote:

Luca and myself spent quite some time to move towards a packaged version of mapnik 4.0.2