Hey,
Regardless, the question is: can composer help? It appears that it can:
Yeah, and we've already done most of the steps to make this work for extensions in core. If you got a MW install, you can already install Wikibase (together with all its dependencies), though its going to leave you with a modified composer.json.
The solution proposed by Hashar in some other thread is to have a "MediaWiki installation" package, which just contains a composer.json file with core in it, where people can add dependencies, and then install. Before that will work, we'll need to get rid of "global scope assumptions" in all core files. For instance, WebStart.php has globals in it, accessed without specifying they are globals. This will break when included via Composer, as it will not do so in global scope.
This global scope problem is also present in pretty much all MediaWiki extensions, except for Wikibase and its libraries, where it was fixed in part to not break when used via Composer. This means we will not be able to do things in core and have extensions automatically work. (Unless you do some kind of hack where you promote all variables in the current scope to global scope, though I suspect we do not want to do this :D).
--scott (who will attempt to ignore future non-technical posts on this
thread)
That is a good explicit rule. Thanks, I'll follow it as well.
Cheers
-- Jeroen De Dauw http://www.bn2vs.com Don't panic. Don't be evil. ~=[,,_,,]:3 --