I've opened a task on Phabricator[1] to attempt to merge the information
in extension.json with Composer's
already-used-by-several-extensions-and-skins composer.json.
Kunal has rightly pointed out that composer doesn't fit some use-cases
for MediaWiki. I see that as an opportunity to be good citizens in the
larger developer community by working to integrate MediaWiki into the
growing ecosystem available on
packagist.org.
For example, if composer had been available, we might not have had to
develop our own HTTP client.
If composer had been available, Brion could have released the work under
includes/normal as its own package. As he says in the README there:
This directory contains some Unicode normalization routines. These
routines are meant to be reusable in other projects, so I'm not
tying them to the MediaWiki utility functions.
(Of course, there was PEAR, but that is ugly and centralized in a way
that composer is not.)
Using Composer for extensions also reduces the learning curve for
developers who want to adapt their work (which may already be available
via Composer) to be used in MediaWiki. It helps us increase the size of
the available developer community without too much effort.
Footnotes:
[1]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T89456
--
Mark A. Hershberger
NicheWork LLC
717-271-1084