On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 7:10 PM, Happy-melon happy-melon@live.com wrote:
As opposed to their wiki breaking when they upgrade for all the other reasons that we document in the release notes?
If you make sure to run update.php, it's very rare for your wiki to break, unless you've hacked things or not updated your extensions or such. We're usually pretty careful to avoid significant regressions when upgrading wikis that are using supported/sane configurations.
I have never built a wiki where texvc has been needed, wanted, or even thought harmless.
Granted, this is not as widely used as some other optional features. There are certainly many wikis that do use it, though -- it's not like no one will be affected.
Currently MW users have to compile and configure a binary from a language 99.99% of them cannot understand, and enable the functionality using config variables. Asking them instead to download and install an extension like every other non-ubiquitous feature in MediaWiki is far from being a regression.
It's a regression for people who already have math working. What's the advantage? We have an awful lot of marginal features in core. When have we ever split a feature that we'd released in core into an extension, when a significant number of people were using it? I don't see the point. It's not like we're going to significantly reduce the size of the tarball or anything.