On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 12:12 PM, Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 11:45 PM, Damon Wang
<damonwang(a)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