This extension has made using MediaWiki an absolute nightmare. Half of my pages grenade with various errors. Wiki means quick ... but I spend more time investigating this crap then working my content.
Topic on Extension talk:Scribunto
What are you using it to do? If it's something that doesn't require a lot of complex templates, then you can probably get away with just uninstalling it.
I don't know about his particular use case, but importing content from Wikipedia and having it work on one's wiki usually requires Scribunto these days; most people won't be able to get away with just uninstalling it. It would be a real hassle to have to design infoboxes and such from scratch, and not use a scripting language.
Agree with Leucosticte. Transwiki requires Scibunto and extension development paradigm is wild west. Hoping key Mediawiki components return to Wiki governance and release/versioning controls at some point. Is there any kind of plan on when this extension will be managed like normal extensions? It's been a long time that this has operated outside normal protocols.
What do you mean by "transwiki"? I'm not aware of any transwiki methods that require Scribunto. Do you mean exporting pages with Special:Export?
Transwiki is the process of moving content from one Wiki to another. With the prominence that Lua now has on en.wikipedia.org, moving content (using any method), generally requires Scribunto be working on the destination (e.g. mine) Wiki.
With other extensions, one is able to match versions and have some confidence that content moved from one wiki to another will work on a similarly configured site. Currently, this is a challenge with Lua.
Yes, I know what transwikiing is. :) Of course, if you're moving content from Wikipedia, then you will need Scribunto. But my point was that not everyone needs to have Wikipedia content on their own wiki. Most of the templates and modules on the English Wikipedia were never designed for portability; even before Scribunto came along transwikiing templates was considered "use at your own risk". The main difference now is that if you get an error it will show a big red "script error" message rather than failing in a less obvious way.
Another difference is that Scribunto is updated more often than MediaWiki's wikitext parser, because Scribunto is much newer. But both will continue to be updated, so there is always the risk of generating errors if you use templates or modules that depend on newer versions of MediaWiki or of Scribunto.
There has been some talk of setting up a centralised wiki or maybe a git repository for developing Lua modules on Wikimedia sites, which would probably make module developers think more about their work being reused on other sites. However, I haven't heard any updates about that recently.
Yes, that will help. Please follow bugzilla:50329 and Requests for comment/Global scripts. A similar proposal is m:Global-Wiki.