Hey,
Checking such extension status is essentially solved by dependency
management. And dependency management is solved by various tools, the one
being relevant to MediaWiki and other PHP projects being Composer [0]. In
fact this capability already exists for several extensions, though there is
no nice GUI for it yet. An example of such version checking can be seen at
[1] which checks if the versions required for a component are up to date
with the ones it provides. In that case the thing being checked for out of
date dependencies in a component itself, though the exact same code can
work for a wiki. Some relevant pages on the existing support are [2, 3, 4].
Implementing the ideas I outlined in [4] is not terribly difficult and will
result in very powerful capabilities. Or rather, it will make them a lot
more visible and accessible, which will then likely result in wider
adoption of the underlying paradigm (dependency management) amongst
extension authors. I estimate that building a working prototype can take as
little as two days, as indeed most of the groundwork has already been done
[5].
That is in contrast to scraping things of gerrit, or relying on info on
MediaWiki.org being comprehensive and up to date, combined with building an
own solution. I anticipate such a solution to be way less powerful, much
harder to maintain, being rather brittle, not being interoperable at all,
and harder to create in the first place.
[0]
http://getcomposer.org/
[1]
https://www.versioneye.com/php/mediawiki:semantic-mediawiki
[2]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Composer
[3]
http://www.bn2vs.com/blog/2014/02/15/introduction-to-composer-for-mediawiki…
[4]
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=31680734
[5] If you think I'm full of shit, throw me 2k USD and I will prove you
wrong
Cheers
--
Jeroen De Dauw
http://www.bn2vs.com
Don't panic. Don't be evil. ~=[,,_,,]:3
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