There seems to been a change to the tags for this extensions. Since tagging is cheap with git, i'm not sure why one extension would deviate from others extensions and break this functionality. The reason it's good to have REL1_22 tags in this repo is to help everyone understand the supported versions with MW and this extension. Please reconsider adding back the REL1_22 and other tags.
Topic on Extension talk:Validator
These release tags like e.g. REL1_22 are very often not the best shot when it comes to installing an extension, no matter if we are talking about this extension here or any other extension. They must naturally be a kind of arbitrary. Probably only extensions bundled with MediaWiki are really safe when using this special tag.
I recommend installing this extension and its dependencies with Composer. It's a bit of a habitual change but it saves time and nerves. :)
extensions bundled are based off of the tags...
They should not be - that approach is inherently broken. Should use the latest stable release. There are solid standards for this, people would do well following them rather then doing their own crazy weird thing.
yet all stable releases have a tag and there should be a stable tag that matches each stable release of MW to match up with any API changes.
Sorry, but I can't agree with this. If you do an update on an extension that requires a new hook added on the latest stable release, it should be tagged for that release, so people downoad the proper version matching its MediaWiki version.
And for the same reason, if we're supporting LTS versions of MediaWiki, we should keep extensions with versions compatible with them, and tagging for such releases is the way to go.
My extensions follow http://semver.org/ rather than some random tagging scheme.
Your semver seems rather random as well. At least, the REL1_XX ensures you're using a version that's compatible with that MediaWiki version, while your versioning doesn't match it, and I was unable to find a table where your semver matches any MediaWiki version.
It's not the first time I see people complaining about a semantic extension breaking MediaWiki when installed (giving errors about undefined methods or parameters mismatch, a clear indication of an incompatibility between MediaWiki version and SMW), and I'm unable to tell them if their SMW version is the right version for that MediaWiki version or not.
I am afraid that REL1_XX does not ensure anything, at least not for me. :( I had as many problems with this kind of tag than with any other tags. However, the compat problem was adressed with Composer I presume.
That chart is rather weak, it doesn't even discuss the dot minor version for MW, nor when it was last updated. So it's only a guideline at most, if you don't support tags, it should at least indicate the last commit hash checked.
Lucky for me SMW wasn't really used so I managed to remove it. Perhaps when more extensions support composer, SMW was the only one, I might reconsider this extension. One thing that isn't desirable with composer it how it removes extensions when it updates, so if you tweaked it for any reason, you've lost the edit. BTW, doesn't composer use the tags or commit hash? It has to effectively use the same hooks everyone else does.