On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 4:34 AM, Jeroen De Dauw jeroendedauw@gmail.comwrote:
Hey,
you're adding in a whole new set of incompatibilities.
How so?
Extensions that use any of these extension libaries now depend on the version of MediaWiki and the version of the extension. That's a new set of dependencies that can be incompatible now.
You're really not thinking of this from the perspective of the person
using the software.
Oh, glad to know you understand what I am thinking, since clearly I do not.
Maintaining MediaWiki installs is already relatively difficult, due to a lack of extension management. Many extensions are also poorly maintained, and just getting an extension that works with your version of MediaWiki reliably is hard. Upgrades are incredibly hard due to this. Adding in another set of incompatibilities is going to make this much harder.
This is making something easier for developers at the expense of admins.
In case of the components
created for Wikidata, we have been supporting Composer for a while now, which is a great fit to our needs.
"We" in this situation is Wikidata and not the developer community. In fact, there were a number of threads about composer with no consensus
and a
number of objections.
Given my first sentence, I would think it is indeed abundantly clear this is about the components created for Wikidata and not the whole community. Thanks for making it even more obvious.
Many of these components are generic enough to
So, what you're saying is that the Wikidata team has
made a decision on behalf of the community?
What I am saying is that I have played around with something that might be of use to the community in general. Where did I imply I, or the WD team, had made a decision for the whole community here? I don't see it, but since you know better then me what I am thinking, please explain.
My concern is adoption of these extension libraries. Other extensions will use these libraries, which is the point of them... If the only way to sanely install them is via composer and a decent number of extensions now relies on them, it's be come a de-facto requirement of MediaWiki, without consensus.
Something that's being sidestepped here is that extensions are being used
as a means to avoid getting things reviewed for core. Quite a few of
these
extensions should just be core functionality or they shouldn't exist.
This is preposterous, and I find the accusation you made outrageous. I'd love to have some constructive discussion here, though this is very difficult if you come at it from the angle you are.
Sorry, I phrased that poorly. Here's my concern: If extension libraries are generic enough that they could be considered core (Diff is a great example), then other extensions will likely use it like core functionality. Wikibase already is. These extensions won't get the same level of review as they would if they were core functionality.
Is there any compelling reason that they are extensions, rather than being added to core?
- Ryan