Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
Do we really want all that in our codebase ? Why can't you just fork ?
Although serving a general community of wikis should never become the primary focus of our software project, i.e. we have more than enough to do just keeping wikipedia on track, I see no harm in sometimes including some features that make it easier for people to use our software for other things.
For one thing, if the software is widely used, we will get a lot more bugtesting and also a lot more interest from developers.
Right now, all the development has been done by people who were interested in the encyclopedia project first and foremost, and saw a need for software to make the pedia run better.
But if the software were a bit more widely usable, then we'd get patches from people to fix bugs or improve performance.
The main thing that people have to understand, if they want to use our software for something else, is that the software will always remain optimized for exactly what we're doing, so extensive addition of huge amounts of code that wouldn't be used by us would probably not be welcomed.
But a little bit of code, I don't see much harm, but I do see a lot of potential benefit.