Two points:
1) The amount of code currently in MobileFrontend that Flow could use is very minimal. May not be worth putting into an extension (as soon as it is in an extension, you have a dependency and a requirement to follow it, you can't have Flow and MobileFrontend using different versions of the same extension).
It's about 20 lines of code to extend ResourceLoaderModule (define resource array 'templates', and load those from disk in the script implementation).
2) All it would provide is "template.add( key, htmlString )" and "template.get( key )" returning said htmlString, it wouldn't invoke the template engine because that's not yet shared. Also at this time, MobileFrontend's version defines this add/get interface as "mw.template" which seems too generic (should probably be mw.mobileFrontend.template or mw.mfTemplate).
— Timo
On 9 Apr 2014, at 15:14, Jon Robson jrobson@wikimedia.org wrote:
I had a chat with Timo in person about this patch: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/111250
He still feels strongly that adding this to core in a generic blob form is not very helpful and adding it to core without a standard JavaScript templating library would also be an incomplete job.
As a result, it seems the best way forward might me to move the code that MobileFrontend is using for this into an extension MediaWikiTemplates that both Flow and MobileFrontend can depend on. We'll make a few modifications to it so it supports both template libraries - Hogan and Handlebars.
This would allow code sharing and iteration on the code and hopefully will lend itself nicely as a shared repository where we can experiment with different templating languages.
Thoughts?