Thread:Extension talk:Cite/Allow defining references not used in page text?

Hello,

I have recently upgraded to MediaWiki 1.20 and noticed that an extension I wrote to keep track of bibliographies (Miranche/BiblioTex) was partly broken. The extension adds functionality to Extension:Cite to use BibTex bibliographic information, both provided in wiki text or stored on the local file system. The references are included in wiki text via ... tags, which basically just unwrap into corresponding tags. These parallel LaTeX usage, and accordingly I have also added ... tags for references that I want to appear in the reference list but not in the text. Using a previous version of Ext:Cite, probably over 2 years old now, this worked no problem. Now, I get cite_error_references_missing_key.

The way I would deal with this locally would be to hack Ext:Cite to add an option, say $wgCiteAllowMissingKey, to allow for such references. I wanted to check, though,
 * Is there a relevant past discussion on why references in the text are now required?
 * Would an option to relax this requirement be useful in the public version of the Cite extension?

Thank you!