[Wikitech-l] Proposal: Extension information files

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hello, In the past few days I've been making good progress on the ExtensionManager extension, and am at the stage where information regarding extensions needs to be stored and polled. In the long term I hope for these files to become widespread (perhaps in nearly all extensions), therefore I'd like to open a discussion about the format -- once implemented it will be difficult to remove features from it, and backwards compatibility would have to be retained indefinitely so a good starting point would be essential. My idea is to use an XML file for each extension, this would be fairly easy to parse (XML support is a requirement for installing MediaWiki) and is easy to write. My suggestion as an example format is (using CategoryStepper as the example) is: <extension> <name>CategoryStepper</name> <version>1.5</version> <description>categorystepper-desc</description> <mediawiki>1.11.0</mediawiki> </extension> While this original version is quite concise it would be easy to expand upon if any further features were needed (for example, there is a possibility of compatibility verification by checking class names etc.). The extensions i18n file will also be loaded within the special page's scope so the <description> tag correlates to a message name allowing for internationalization. The <mediawiki> tag correlates to the minimum MediaWiki version required, the rest are probably self explanatory. Any input on this matter is greatly appreciated. Thank you, MinuteElectron.