Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
All extension branches were removed during the migration to Git. Very few extensions have branches for MW core major version support. There's no longer a simple way to branch all extensions when a core release is updated, and nobody has volunteered to write a script.
So we're back to the situation we had in MW 1.9 and earlier, where it's usually not possible to run any actively maintained extension against an MW core that's not the current trunk.
Given this, I think code reviewers should insist on backwards compatibility with MW 1.20 for commits to the master branch of extensions that are commonly used outside Wikimedia, at least until the release management issue is solved.
ACK. Also, I do not think that branching in accord with core is the right thing to do for extensions as then a user is faced with a squared number of potential combinations.
Extensions instead should have proper versioning (of their own), with clearly stated support for/requirement of a Me- diaWiki release/HEAD, so no extension releases are made just to increase the version number even when no code was changed, and on the other hand breaking changes in exten- sions can be handled in different extension releases, i. e., you don't have to update to LiquidThread 3.0 just to get compatibility with MediaWiki 1.21.
Tim