Talk:Requests for comment/Replacing extension distributor

GitHub, need for an extension

GitHub offers ZIP file downloads for branches and tags (example: download of Wikidata branch of MediaWiki core). Is there additional functionality that we need to provide? If not, is there a strong case not to just use GitHub's infrastructure for this? Yes, we want to rely on our own repo as much as possible, but this seems an area where an exception is justifiable if it gets the job done.

Secondly, regardless of whether we use GitHub our own packaging service, do we still need a special page for this, or, going forward, could it just be managed via a clever template generating the links? Eloquence (talk) 19:33, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

In response to the first half of your statement: I think we still need at least some layer of our own between the zip-generating-service (whether it's Github or Gitweb or a hamster running tar). The main reason for this is so we can give users MediaWiki versions to choose from (if you just used Github or Gitweb without middleware, you'd need to know what version you're looking for already--many users don't).

For the second part: I'm not married to it being an extension, but if we get rid of Special:ExtensionDistributor we'll still want some sort of redirect in place for the links we'll be breaking.

^demon (talk) 19:38, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Sure. Whether at the end of the day the logic for generating lists and branches/tags lives in a lightweight extension or a Lua template or whatever probably doesn't matter much. My concern is mostly with the hamsters/zip-generation service. If we don't absolutely need to invest time in making gitweb's/gitblit's downloading facilities scale and can just use GitHub's, I'd argue in favor of that to conserve energy. Eloquence (talk) 19:54, 18 December 2012 (UTC)