On 2015-11-05, Ryan Lane rlane32@gmail.com wrote:
Is this simply to support hosted providers? npm is one of the worst package managers around. This really seems like a case where thin docker images and docker-compose really shines. It's easy to handle from the packer side, it's incredibly simple from the user side, and it doesn't require reinventing the world to distribute things.
I got heavily involved in to node world recently and I fully share your opinion about npm and npm@3 takes the disaster to the next level.
Are we using some native npm modules in our stack? *That* is hard to support.
If this is the kind of stuff we're doing to support hosted providers, it seems it's really time to stop supporting hosted providers. It's $5/month to have a proper VM on digital ocean. There's even cheaper solutions around. Hosted providers at this point aren't cheaper. At best they're slightly easier to use, but MediaWiki is seriously handicapping itself to support this use-case.
I feel very strongly there is a need for a quick setup for people who have their LAMP stack already working and feel familiar with that environment. The problem is that a full-stack MediaWiki is no longer a LAMP application. Those people aren't going away any soon and joining the coolest game in town.
I have already written scripts to keep code, vendor and core skins in sync from git. I am beginning to write even more scripts to quickly deploy/destroy MW instances. (My platform does not do Docker, btw.).
Maybe the right strategic move will be to implement MediaWiki phase four in the server-side JavaScript. Then the npm way is probably the only way forward.
Saper