On 02/06/2013 02:24 PM, Jeroen De Dauw wrote:
MediaWiki is currently closer to being a ball of mud then a set of core components nicely separated and working together via clean interfaces.
I don't disagree. But we're also a strange amalgamation of volunteers, administrators of wikis, consultants providing services for customers, and WMF-employed developers.
I agree that Niklas and you are talking about something that should be done. The problem is: who is going to do it? How is it going to be accomplished?
For that matter, what is "it"?
We have so many components that could just as well be independent from the rest of the codebase, but they are not.
With the introduction of Composer, we can begin to think about breaking MediaWiki up into discrete components.
Perhaps that is a good way to start thinking about it?
I think extensions can be "Composed" with MediaWiki right now. It wouldn't be hard to move almost entire languages directory off to "composable" bits (though Niklas and the other TWN folks might kill me for even suggesting that, given how much they had to suffer in the move from svn to git).
We would still want a legacy tarball, but even that could be composed at the time of distribution.