Hello extension developers, extension users, and people who hate NFS:
I'm finishing up rewriting ExtensionDistributor[0] so it'll be more reliable and not rely on NFS. In the process of doing this, I've changed how it fetches the archives. Instead of cloning all of the repositories and generating the archives on-disk, we'll now utilize the Github API to generate archives for us (this is configurable, if we decide that Github isn't going to work for some reason). I think this is really cool because it supports both tags *and* branches.
Now, since the big move to Git, ExtensionDistributor hasn't really worked for branches other than master. When we deploy the new version, I'm thinking we configure $wgExtDistBranches as follows:
$wgExtDistBranches = array( 'master', 'SNAPSHOT-for-1.21', 'SHAPSHOT-for-1.20', ... );
We can go ahead and create tags for the existing released versions to approximate snapshots of each extension as of the corresponding MediaWiki release. Extension authors can update the tag (or maybe use a branch, if they want) using the same name that we have configured.
I'm willing to bikeshed (a little) on the "SNAPSHOT-for-1.21" tag names, but I was looking for something that would be unlikely to conflict with people's existing tags/branches, and clear that it's a snapshot in most instances.
I don't have an exact date picked for deployment yet, but it'd be nice to have the snapshot tag names sorted out before we do.
-Chad