I would very, *very* much prefer to not have MediaWiki core extensions written in JavaScript. Even beyond my criticisms of JavaScript as a language, I feel like that just unnecessarily introduces complexity. The purpose of this wrapper is to combine separate micro-services that would otherwise be run in separate VMs / servers / etc. so that it can easily be run in a hosting setup.
Otherwise, I'm interested in what implications this will have, especially for making MediaWiki easier to install and use, which would be awesome.
-- Tyler Romeo https://parent5446.nyc 0x405D34A7C86B42DF
From: C. Scott Ananian cananian@wikimedia.org Reply: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: November 6, 2015 at 14:14:13 To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] [RFC/Summit] `npm install mediawiki-express`
Let's not let this discussion sidetrack into "shared hosting vs VMs (vs docker?)" --- there's another phabricator ticket and summit topic for that ( https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T87774 and https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T113210.
I'd prefer to have discussion in *this* particular task/thread concentrate on:
* Hey, we can have JavaScript and PHP in the same packaging system. What cool things might that enable?
* Hey, we can have JavaScript and PHP running together in the same server. Perhaps some persistence-related issues with PHP can be made easier?
* Hey, we can actually write *extensions for mediawiki-core* in JavaScript (or CoffeeScript, or...) now. Or run PHP code inside Parsoid. How could we use that? (Could it grow developer communities?)
* How are parser extensions (like, say, WikiHiero, but there are lots of them) going to be managed in the long term? There are three separate codebases to hook right now. An extension like <gallery> might eventually need to hook the image thumbnail service, too. Do we have a plan?
And the pro/anti-npm and pro/anti-docker and pro/anti-VM discussion can go into one of those other tasks. Thanks.
--scott _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l