For the last four months, my main focus has been the Librarization project [0]. Today a wrap up blog post was posted to blog.wikimedia.org [1] that I'd invite all of you to read to get an overview of what our high level goals and motivations were and what we accomplished. The TL;DR is that we now have some guidelines for how to separate code from MediaWiki and publish it as a semi-autonomous open source project.
The blog post ends with a thinly veiled call to action for MediaWiki developers to continue the work of extracting code from the current MediaWiki core application and publishing them as independent libraries. We've published some information on how to deal with git hosting, code review, and various other general issues on mediawiki.org [2]. There is also a list of some areas of the existing code base that we thought would be interesting targets for extraction [3]. The CDB library [4] can serve as one concrete example of using the guidelines.
I'd like to invite anyone interested in starting work on decoupling a particular area of the code to start a thread on wikitech-l and file a task in Librarization phabricator project [5] to attract collaborators and help reduce possible duplication of effort. It would also be great to have edits on the list page and/or phabricator tasks to act as a wish list of things that know of in MediaWiki that you would either like to be able to use in a non-MediaWiki PHP project or feel would be a good candidate for isolation so that alternate implementations could be introduced.
[0]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Library_infrastructure_for_MediaWiki [1]: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/01/29/modernizing-mediawiki-with-libraries/ [2]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Developing_libraries [3]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Library_infrastructure_for_MediaWiki/Library_... [4]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/CDB [5]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/librarization/
Bryan