On Sat, 28 Jul 2012 17:33:42 -0700, Daniel Renfro <[email protected]>
wrote:
To all developers:
I would like to gather some feedback for an idea that has been around
for a while -- implementing an extension manager for Mediawiki.
The topic came up a few times recently at Wikimania 2012's "Ask the
developers" session and got me thinking. I've been developing with
Mediawiki for 7 years now and have no contributed anything significant
to the community. I've taken on this project as a serious opportunity to
contribute, and would like to get some comments, opinions, and general
feedback (if not some interested parties willing to help out!) I've
expanded the current "request for comments" page to include a history of
the idea and a number of ideas for features.
You can view the proposal at [
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Extension_release_management
]. Please leave your comments on the Talk page (and don't forget to sign
your name!)
-Daniel
MW: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:DanielRenfro
IRC: daniel_renfro
Shouldn't you have created your own RFC instead of usurping ^demon/Chad's?
Speaking of Chad. He's been dying to work on his project trying to create
a configuration database for MediaWiki. He's been busy with Gerrit stuff
but hoping to work on configuration after that's done.
I think that extension management is the second step. We can't have a good
system for installing extensions in a UI when we don't even have a good
system for configuring MediaWiki in a UI.
I don't like what's in the "Thoughts on client-server model" section.
- Firstly a lot of the reasoning is based on the assumption "The
repository would most definitely be an instance of Mediawiki itself". But
there's no reason provided why we need to do that. Almost no-one needs the
ability to run a centralized repository besides Wikimedia and perhaps some
in-house environments that want to handle extensions themselves (and a
good portion of those may not want to even bother with this remote stuff;
They'll just run some script to distribute extension code to their servers
and run install scripts). So there is no reason that the server needs to
be written in PHP much less be part of MediaWiki. There are other
languages and many of them may have libraries that are better at doing
this kind of thing on the server than PHP does it. I see no reason to
preclude the possibility of using a different language if someone shows
that there would be some advantage to doing so.
- This section appears to assume that extension distribution would be
handled by the server including the code for all extensions inside of it's
extensions/ directory and serving them out. This does not seem right.
Extension distribution code will likely involve something that interacts
more directly with code repositories or allows uploading of tarballs than
something that just serves files from a directory. In fact that's almost
necessary to properly handle versions.
- I should probably point this out as a side point. Wikimedia host the
standard central repository. Even if we 'were' to develop something the
way you describe there where the wiki distributes extensions it serves
itself. Wikimedia would probably NOT be using this system to distribute
extensions to it's own wikis. ie: There is no recursive problem anyways
because Wikimedia wouldn't be using the system to distribute itself.
"Extension pages can ONLY exist (excluding subpages) if an extension has
been defined in the database, a path to the repo given, and author(s)
defined"
I see no reason to lock in an Extension: page = part of the repository
setup like this. We can provide parser functions and whatnot to display
extension information on Extension: pages on MW.org. And we can use some
method to use information on the extension base itself to define some
information for extensions, etc... but Extension pages and extension
management will be two separate things.
"(requirement) don't break the current extensions"
Extensions currently depend on our old method of configuration. This means
that the idea of installing an extension via interface and the idea of
keeping extensions as-is is already incompatible. Extensions are
inevitably going to need to be tweaked to start working in an interface
based installation environment.
Unless you just mean that new versions of MediaWiki should keep working
with old require_once based extensions until they migrate to the extension
installer setup.
--
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]
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