On 07/22/2013 09:20 AM, Derric Atzrott wrote:
If we require composer, we require users to learn to use composer. Some like myself have never used it, and while it’s a skill I should probably learn that will save me considerable time, it may be that not all will find being forced to learn a new piece of software so great.
Of course I could be missing something here.
Composer is becoming widely used in the PHP universe. If your only focus of development is MediaWiki, then, yes, this is a pain.
However, the use of composer could open up whole new possibilities. For the old Perl hands, composer is a lot like cpan. There are a lot of ugly things in there, but it doesn't take too much to find some really useful re-usable components.
And composer would only be a requirement for developers, not end users. There is no reason that we can't still distribute tarballs that a Sysadmin who just maintains a wiki or a wiki farm today would install in the same way he currently does.
Mark.