On Thu, 27 Sep 2012 18:47:41 -0700, Mark A. Hershberger
<m...@everybody.org> wrote:
On 09/26/2012 01:54 PM, Krinkle wrote:
We're going towards a flexible modular system, which
means components have dependencies and build on each other - as opposed
to just
"being there".
This sounds great, but I do see an important missing piece of
infrastructure.
First, I am absolutely in favor of a loosely-coupled, modular system
instead of just building a larger and larger core.
The problem, though, is that there is no way to install, use, or update
extensions apart from doing it by hand. Requiring the installation of
multiple modules by hand isn't going to lead to a thriving, modular
ecosystem. We need a dependency manager.
Thankfully, I think there is already a dependency manager that we can
build on.
I'm talking about Composer (http://getcomposer.org/).
Of course, MediaWiki isn't aware of this dependency manager and so
MediaWiki's extensions aren't either. I've only looked at it briefly,
but it appears that adding support wouldn't be difficult at all -- it
would just mean adding a file to the git repository.
What do you think?
Mark.
We probably don't want to depend much on it.
Composer is really a tool for 3rd party library installation. And
extensions aren't 3rd party libraries.
Some issues with Composer in this regard:
- Composer is a CLI library install tool. Depending on it will very likely
get in the way of offering web based extension installation like just
about every other major CMS.
- Composer installs libraries in some arbitrary path (default vendor/,
requires setting an ENV var or cli parameter to change) and politely asks
you to use it's method of autoloading. This means the usual way of
handling extensions with our own dir and require_once is out of the door.
This probably won't work at all without a severe hack since we setup
things in a php file we always require. It will also probably completely
break extension asset loading.
- Composer is not a full-fledged typical package manager. You cannot do
something like `php composer.phar install
mediawiki/Extension-ParserFunctions` you can only run `php composer.phar
install` somewhere that a composer.json is defined. This means a few
things:
-- We can't make core depend on every extension so we will have to install
with an individual extension as a base.
-- This means you will have to install things by manually downloading
some. And letting composer install others from within that extension.
-- As a result of this Composer is going to try to install things in
extensions/Foo/vendor/... this means our standard structure won't work.
Worse Composer is not going to share things between extensions and
probably won't work in the first place.
--
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]
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