Hi Krinkle!
Thanks for the clarification!
mediawiki.searchSuggest does NOT use jquery.ui.autocomplete.
Yes, I know. I never said anything like this. Maybe this was a misunderstanding. I said I wanted to replace "mediawiki.searchSuggest" with my own implementation _based on_ "jquery.ui.autocomplete". As "jquery.ui.autocomplete" is delivered together with MW and can easily be made available on the client side thanks to ResourceLoader and its dependency management it was a good choice for me.
Instead you'd register your own module with its own name and make sure it is loaded instead of some other module. The method used can differ based on the feature at hand, but handling this at the module level is not the way to go.
Yes I understand this. And I think this was my problem. I did not find a proper way to "make sure it is loaded instead of some other module", because 'mediawiki.searchSuggest' module is added by OutputPage and there seems to be no way (but changing the current users settings as Matt suggested) to avoid that.
I think in the case of SearchSuggest it should probably be loaded by the Skin [...]
This would probably be a good idea as it may allow a more specific server side hook. :)
So, again, thanks for your explanations. Those where very helpful and I think I now have a better understanding of the concepts of modules.
-- Robert