SMWCon Fall 2013/Improving dependency management and easing upgrades

During Wikimania 2013 in Hong Kong, I had a chance to talk in person with several users of MediaWiki and Semantic MediaWiki. A common theme emerged: cumbersome upgrades and a lack of dependency management. We're going to be working on these issues.

I'll talk about the projects that need to be done, what you can expect and how you can get involved.


 * Current situation
 * Upgrading MediaWiki is easy, upgrading extensions is not
 * Hard to find working extension versions for older MW releases
 * Becomes even more apparent with LTS version


 * Development for different versions
 * Compatibility layer / mulitple supported MediaWikis
 * Doesn't solve the actual problem
 * Tagging in git
 * How it works
 * Problem: backporting of security and bugfixes for older versions
 * Branching in git
 * Currently not supported


 * Managing dependencies
 * Require minimum version
 * How do we define a maximum version
 * How about several dependencies, e.g. Stub


 * Crowd certification
 * different paradigm: show what works instead of excluding things that don't work
 * On mediawiki.org, everyone can indicate working combinations
 * WikiApiary can also be a good indicator


 * Discussion