Thread:Talk:Requests for comment/Extension management with Composer/A way to disable extensions/reply (15)

I think you both have very valid points.

Having every extension check a config variable and disable itself is not a solution in my opinion. Some will do it, some won't. It will get messy. And it will get really messy once you get to dependency trees that are more than one or two levels deep. The whole point of dependency management is to not have to check if everything is in place. Take the Lingo extension. It depends on ext-dom (not a very good example, i know). Now suppose somebody switched that off. Lingo would consequently not load. However, SemanticGlossary would, because all its dependencies are there. And yes, you could put all sorts of logic into maintaining that config var of switched off extensions, but doing that in each and every extension is just wrong.

Would it be possible (both technically and "politically") to change composer, so that you could load and install a library, but switch it off, so that the library itself and all depending libraries are not included in the autoloader? This way you would only need one set of libraries for all wikis of a farm and only the autoloading scripts need to be different.