Hey,
Is adding Composer support orthogonal to the idea of making it trivial to
install MediaWiki extensions?
It is not.
Strictly speaking one thing did get past the "wouldn't it be nice
if...." stage. It used to be possible to install PHPUnit and run our tests with that simply by running `{composer} install`, until someone went and deleted composer.json as a "feature".
This comment seems to be based on misunderstanding of both the past and present situation. Let me clarify. Before the mentioned change:
* PHPUnit would be installed by default whenever doing an install via Composer * People could not install anything else via Composer as this would cause conflicts in composer.json
Present situation:
* By default nothing is installed * Users can choose whatever they want to add, _including_ PHPUnit
It seems that the idea of using Composer more in MediaWiki generally comes
up at least once every 2-3 months, but we never get beyond the "wouldn't it be nice if...." stage.
Several extensions currently support installation via Composer, and this capability is already utilized by users of those extensions. For the next release of Semantic MediaWiki, installation via Composer will be the recommended approach. So we are not only past the "wouldn't it be nice if...." stage, we also are past the initial implementation stage. There are still many additional "wouldn't it be nice if...." things that can be done on top, such as creating a GUI for installing extensions. Perhaps writing an RFC for those would be of actual use, though in a lot of cases creating a proof of concept and discussing that might be better use of ones time.
Cheers
-- Jeroen De Dauw http://www.bn2vs.com Don't panic. Don't be evil. ~=[,,_,,]:3 --