On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 12:12 PM, Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 11:45 PM, Damon Wang damonwang@uchicago.edu wrote:
Can we make update.php ask the user if he wants to install the new extension?
That would be hacky and unreliable. We'd have to make sure the versions match, automatically alter LocalSettings.php (!), hope that the wiki files are writable to the web server (they probably aren't), hope that it's not on a firewalled intranet, . . . also, update.php doesn't require user interaction, and changing that would break everything.
Is there any place we could get usage statistics for the math feature?
No, we don't have this kind of tracking in place. People would probably object if we did.
I think the advantages for new installations justify inconveniencing some existing users, especially if we can automate installation of the new extension, but this discussion would be better with some data.
I'm not so much worried about math specifically as about what would happen if we started systematically moving relatively-unused things from core to extensions. Few people use math, but a whole lot of people probably use at least one little-used feature that could be moved to an extension. We generally haven't moved things from core to extensions AFAIK -- if we started doing it, it could cumulatively have repercussions on ease of upgrade, for no real benefit that I see.
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What if it was written as an extension and moved to /extensions? Then we get the benefit of decoupling Math from the core software, but we don't require users to download a new extension to keep their existing functionality. As long as it's clearly indicated in the RELEASE-NOTES and relevant Manual pages that you might need to update the path to Math, I don't see a huge drawback.
-Chad