Le 28/09/12 03:47, Mark A. Hershberger a écrit :
<snip>
The problem, though, is that there is no way to
install, use, or update
extensions apart from doing it by hand. Requiring the installation of
multiple modules by hand isn't going to lead to a thriving, modular
ecosystem. We need a dependency manager.
Thankfully, I think there is already a dependency manager that we can
build on.
I'm talking about Composer (
http://getcomposer.org/).
I am going to need such a dependency manager for continuous integration
of our extensions. I am not going to maintain a list of each extension
dependency nor am I going to write some piece of code to handle that.
Composer is IMHO a great way to handle our dependencies.
My past experiment is on the wiki at:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Composer
The change is not that much invading (it is just about adding a
composer.json file at the root of the extension) and thus is definitely
not going to harm anything. Even if we end up choosing a different
system (PEAR??) or writing our own, that is just a simple json file.
Of course, MediaWiki isn't aware of this
dependency manager and so
MediaWiki's extensions aren't either. I've only looked at it briefly,
but it appears that adding support wouldn't be difficult at all -- it
would just mean adding a file to the git repository.
Composer has the ability to generate an autoload file for all the
dependencies and craft a general autoloader that your application can
use to load everything.
I have submitted to upstream a patch that add some very basic support
for MediaWiki installation:
https://github.com/composer/installers/pull/37
https://github.com/composer/installers/commit/43dd8edf22b3e9468b18db04c0b10…
Which basically make it such that mediawiki/my-extension is installed
under extensions/MyExtension (aka using CamelCase). It is not in
Composer yet, you will have to run the latest head to take advantage of it.
I am assuming the autoloading stuff would need to be added to that
mediawiki-extension Composer plugin. Someone would need to have a look
at that :-]
If anyone has any interest in adding MediaWiki extension support in
Composer, please reach them in their #composer IRC channel or via their
mailing list. I am sure they will be glad to help us on that front.
And again, adding support for Composer would just need:
- write basic code to include the generated autoload file
- add some composer.json files in extension roots
We could start with a subset of extensions.
--
Antoine "hashar" Musso