Although I didn't have any plans to make the image search into a MediaWiki extension (the original concept was rather different), your proposal is certainly interesting and useful (not to mention not too outlandish), so I will keep it in mind.
The reliability of the toolserver is a real issue, but one of the strengths of coding a standalone toolserver tool versus coding a MediaWiki extension is that developers get more freedom tweaking and improving the code (sometimes on a whim), which means new features can suddenly crop up overnight. With MediaWiki, you have to make sure the thing actually works ;)
Cheers,
Tangotango
-----Original Message----- From: Brianna Laugher [mailto:brianna.laugher@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, January 25, 2007 6:12 PM To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] The Ideal Wiki Software
A lot of attention suddenly. :) Any chance you could make it a full-blown extension rather than a toolserver job? ( http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8738 )
We already have a lot of super-useful/critical tools relying on the toolserver, and as we can well see, it's not always so reliable...anything super-useful/critical is best off ultimately as part of MediaWiki.
Wait, that was the original point to my post! ;)
Anyway I and the other Commoners will await such developments with interest.
cheers, Brianna