Thread:Talk:Requests for comment/Extension management with Composer/A way to disable extensions/reply (13)

> running a wiki farm, and debugging one's own installation.

I do not see the actual problem in either case. You are guessing some stuff will be very hard or not possible. However if you know how to use this tool I think you can do everything you need to do without to much bother. Some things will get a bit more cumbersome, though at the same time others become less so.

> so for the debugging, one would have to keep re-installing different combinations

In some cases you might want to do this yes. Though is removing the thing from the composer file and running composer update really that hard? It's slightly more work than commenting out an extension. Though at the same time it will also stop loading not needed dependencies automatically, which you'd have to do manually otherwise.

Also, disabling extensions is one thing you might want to do during debugging (though not something you do every minute I'd hope). Another thing is switching between different versions. That one is actually easier with Composer.

> wiki farm you'd have to literally have a different set of code for each possible combination

Yeah so? Disk space is a non-issue. I personally would prefer this approach if I ran a wiki farm, it's way less scary than running different wikis with different config and even different extensions via "the same" code.

> That's not to mention the difficulty it would place on maintaining any local changes to the code.

If you do not manage your changes via git, then yeah, things could get difficult. (Though in many cases you could still do what you want to do without to much hassle). The only place where this gets really annoying is if you indeed have a farm and need the changes at all places. In which case you can just stuff them in git and have much more solid control over your farm than you'd otherwise have as well.

> Also, can you explain in what way my proposed system would undermine things?

I have already done so in a previous post.