Thread:Project:Current issues/Finding the correct version of an extension/reply

Yes, there's currently no way to reliably download extensions. This is very unsatisfactory and has been discussed several times on this wiki, bugzilla, wikitech-l and mediawiki-l but there's no solution on sight coming from the devs; try reading/joining those discussions to find partial solutions...

Additionally, 1.17 is unsupported and 1.18 will be soon the next, so I think you're really supposed to upgrade to 1.19 or 1.20.