On Mon, Jun 2, 2014 at 6:37 PM, James HK jamesin.hongkong.1@gmail.com wrote:
That is just the unfortunate truth. We are not going to misuse libraries and hack together MediaWiki just so
extension
installation can be *slightly* easier.
This sort of behaviour towards non-WMF extension developers is interesting and if your objective is to alienate (as with the attitude above) volunteer developers then your on the right path.
You are free to use composer.json to manage extensions, in which case you should version it in SCM. There's no conflict here. We did not favor one use-case over another; we went with the path that coheres with the design of Composer, as explicitly discussed in fantastic detail in its documentation, bringing MediaWiki in line with every other significant application or framework that uses Composer that I could find.
We're not so far down a path that we can't change course, but I've yet to see you rebut any of the points I raised in my commit message accompanying change I3e7c668ee[0] or articulate a coherent alternative.
As for the accusation that the current approach favors the WMF, it's almost not worth responding to. We don't even intend to use Composer in production; all the momentum behind the recent work around Composer integration has in mind how MediaWiki fits with the broader open-source ecosystem.