There has been some talk among developers and others about bundling some extensions with the tarball. The new installer supports enabling extensions during installation, so if we're going to do it, I would like to start bundling them with the 1.18 tarball.
Part of my motivation is that many people seem to install MediaWiki and expect a wiki that acts very similar to Wikipedia, with which they are more familiar. Now, part of the problem is documentation — these people don't understand how the functionality of MediaWiki is partitioned. But in addition to documentation, we can start providing the most expected functionality in the tarball.
Immediately, the objection of “bloat” would be raised. To alleviate this concern, we can still provide a “MediaWiki-lite” tarball with only the contents of phase3 as before.
Assuming that we are going to put *some* extensions in, we need to decide which ones. Based on the problem reports in Bugzilla, I think at least Cite and ParserFunctions should be bundled. Others would be Gadgets and WikiEditor.
So my list would be:
Cite ParserFunctions Gadgets WikiEditor
Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Version or http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Extensions_used_on_Wikimedia and see which you would recommend we include.
Mark.