On 02/16/2015 09:34 AM, Mark A. Hershberger wrote:
I've opened a task on Phabricator[1] to attempt to merge the information in extension.json with Composer's already-used-by-several-extensions-and-skins composer.json.
Can we please centralize this discussion? We're discussing this on-wiki, and now it's spread to Phabricator and wikitech-l.
Kunal has rightly pointed out that composer doesn't fit some use-cases for MediaWiki. I see that as an opportunity to be good citizens in the larger developer community by working to integrate MediaWiki into the growing ecosystem available on packagist.org.
For example, if composer had been available, we might not have had to develop our own HTTP client.
I don't buy this argument. If there had been code available for us to use and there was an advantage to using it instead of writing our own, we probably would have just copied it into core like we have done with other PHP code in includes/libs/. But this has already been discussed before[1].
If composer had been available, Brion could have released the work under includes/normal as its own package. As he says in the README there:
This directory contains some Unicode normalization routines. These routines are meant to be reusable in other projects, so I'm not tying them to the MediaWiki utility functions.
There's nothing stopping us from doing that now. I've moved the code to includes/libs/normal, so it shouldn't be too difficult.[2]
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Third-party_components [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T88485
-- Legoktm