Thread:Talk:ResourceLoader/Default modules/Can't tell what is a module name and what not/reply (3)

That heading would break existing links, but you could do it if you add anchor with the old values. You kind of have a point about mediaWiki.config, but it is an object and needs to be documented somewhere.

The dependencies are in Resources.php, but generally you don't need to worry about that. You just depend on what you need. If you need to add stuff to the watchlist, you depend on. You don't need to worry about what it depends on.

I think the ResourceLoader is quite useful. There are two big reasons:
 * It handles minification and concatenation quite well, and some MediaWiki message (for i18n) cases (I am working on improving this).
 * It handles dependencies properly, and if you're writing an extension, or in MW core, the dependency interface is nice (you just specify an array of dependencies in a module definition). It is currently a bit of a pain for user scripts, though you can still pass an array of dependencies to using if there's more than one you need at the same time.  Improving the user script and gadget experience is an important goal.

Since the good ol' days, MW has added a lot of useful scripts with various dependency chains. Further, other major sites have gotten faster through techniques like minification, and we need to do the same. RL also has other useful side features like flipping CSS automatically for right-to-left languages.