[Mediawiki-l] Extension bundling for 1.18

Mark A. Hershberger mhershberger at wikimedia.org
Wed Jun 8 15:59:01 UTC 2011


[Cross-posted from wikitech-l]

There has been some talk among developers and others about bundling some
extensions with the tarball.  The new installer supports enabling
extensions during installation, so if we're going to do it, I would like
to start bundling them with the 1.18 tarball.

Part of my motivation is that many people seem to install MediaWiki and
expect a wiki that acts very similar to Wikipedia, with which they are
more familiar.  Now, part of the problem is documentation — these people
don't understand how the functionality of MediaWiki is partitioned.  But
in addition to documentation, we can start providing the most expected
functionality in the tarball.

Immediately, the objection of “bloat” would be raised.  To alleviate
this concern, we can still provide a “MediaWiki-lite” tarball with only
the contents of phase3 as before.

Assuming that we are going to put *some* extensions in, we need to
decide which ones.  Based on the problem reports in Bugzilla, I think at
least Cite and ParserFunctions should be bundled.  Others would be
Gadgets and WikiEditor.

So my list would be:

    Cite
    ParserFunctions
    Gadgets
    WikiEditor

Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Version or
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Extensions_used_on_Wikimedia and
see which you would recommend we include.

Mark.



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