Dmitriy Sintsov wrote:
Currently I use mw.loader.load(), which can be replaced with importScriptURI(). However I don't want to go step back then move again to 1.17/1.18. I've managed to "postpone" visual editor thing, now I'll try to adapt few another extensions. I wanted RTE because it handles wikitext better, but I didn't know how large Wikia codebase was. It is work of large organization. While I am just a single "freelancer" with extremly limited time and funds.
Imagine, I've had issues with WMF Extension:TimedMediaHandler because it already was developed for yet unreleased 1.18, while the large part of non-WMF extensions are not even up to 1.16. Such a "lagging" codebase! How many time would it take to update the extensions? Even the major extensions like SocialProfile still do not use ResourceLoader. I am worrying that I bite myself with choosing 1.17 for my new customer's installation. That's why I've asked whether 1.16 can be made LTS (many years of bugfixes and extensions backcompatibility). If that is too much, maybe 1.17 can be such long-supported version? Dmitriy
MediaWiki is largely backwards compatible. An extension designed for 1.15 is very likely to still work in trunk version (even though it may not get advantage of ResourceLoader, for instance). There are some core changes that affect extensions, but in such cases we usually update the extensions, too. Just download it from the appropiate branch.