On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 11:53 AM, Jon Robson <jrobson@wikimedia.org> wrote:

The problem with both Flow and MobileFrontend being dependent on
another extension is that when yet another new extension is built it
won't necessarily think to use this extension and will end up using
its own templating language/method of shipping templates to the client
when it sees there is nothing like that in core.

Shahyar mentioned this, teams doing work useful to other groups that's "hidden" in their extension. The revived Tech talks are a way to expose big-ticket features over time. Extensions should list their "interesting" technology on-wiki somewhere, it's on my TODO list for Flow.

If we are worried about providing incomplete features to 3rd party
users e.g. templating without a standard library maybe we should be
maintaining a Wikimedia fork of MediaWiki where we can do this stuff
but I don't think this kind of behaviour can continue.

Two other workarounds:

1. One extension can call the feature from the other. Right now you do that by require OtherExtension.php which triggers DB updates and tests; is there a lighter-weight way to say "I want a function from MobileFrontend/includes/modules/MFResourceLoaderModule.php" ?

2. We create extensions/WikimediaFeaturesTeam for shared code.

=S Page Features engineer