On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 5:42 PM, Jeroen De Dauw <jeroendedauw(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hey Bryan,
What exactly justifies such an authoritarian "need to go though some
permission process" setup? Exactly what problems are we currently seeing?
I'm very sceptical about such an approach. Sure you can say things such as
that I'd be nice for other people to have access. The reality is that most
people don't care about most extensions and that a lot of them end up being
unmaintained and very low quality to begin with. Telling volunteers they
should go follow a process they do not want to follow and that they should
use a code hosting service they do not want to use has its down sides. This
was also not done in the past. You did not need approval to create a
"certified MediaWiki extension" or something like that.
As of
https://github.com/composer/packagist/issues/163#issuecomment-99673878
Packagist itself has created this restriction of vendor namespaces
actually indicating some level of ownership. A vendor is a supplier of
a good or service. Publishing something as mediawiki/* is explicitly
claiming affiliation with the MediaWiki open source project. As such
it seems not unreasonable to ensue that projects claiming to be
supplied by the MediaWiki community actually are indeed serviceable by
that community. Note that there is no form of restriction for
publishing a package that provides a MediaWiki extension or other
related functionality under another namespace.
I would certainly welcome an RfC discussion of the current policy and
a potential replacement. From my point of view, use of the MediaWiki
brand implies endorsement by the MediaWiki community and thus should
only be easily available to projects that are able to be contributed
to and managed by that community. If for example a serious security
flaw was found in a mediawiki/foo package on Packagist the community
should be empowered to fix it.
Bryan
--
Bryan Davis Wikimedia Foundation <bd808(a)wikimedia.org>
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] Sr Software Engineer Boise, ID USA
irc: bd808 v:415.839.6885 x6855