MediaWiki.org is great for extension authors, as far as it goes. Today, though, someone asked on #mediawiki how to create development branches for their extension in their SVN repo. I told him I didn't think it could be done — that he might have to use the SVN repo as a backend to push to from git or bzr — but I'm not sure that answer was correct.
Anyway, as I was writing about the UNIQ tracking bug, I thought of some documentation and support that we should try to get in place for extension developers. Since Sumana is creating a lot of good documentation about testing lately, that is where I started:
* What sort of things should they test?
* Can they have tests that will continue to work against the current parser and the next one?
* How can they write parser tests and unit tests to try out their code?
* How can they make sure that those tests are run on the test server? (I think this actually requires some work on the test server, but…)
Of course, that documentation would help more than just the extension writers who have “UNIQ” showing up in their output. What else could we do to support extension authors?
Mark.