It seems desirable and fair to me to allow for "fast track" removal of obsolete code, but only if we create a clear process for making an extensions "official". How exactly would an extension developer make sure that we know their extension, and consider it part of the ecosystem? In practice, "known code" is code accessible via codesearch[5]. But how does one get an extension into the codesearch index? There is currently no clear process for this.
Ideally, it would be sufficient to:
- create a page on mediawiki.org using the {{Extension}} infobox,
- setting the status to "stable" (and maybe "beta"),
- and linking to a public git repository.
It should be simple enough to create a script that feeds these repos into codesearch. A quick look at Category:Extensions_by_status category tells me that there are about a thousand such extensions.
A clear and straightforward policy for getting things "in" sounds great. However, this might encourage the addition of extensions that are ultimately abandoned and which themselves become a code maintenance burden. We should also consider our policy for getting things "out". This is often a more difficult issue.
Bill Pirkle Software Engineer www.wikimediafoundation.org