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.