[Semediawiki-user] Possible change of plans for extension global vars renaming

[Yaron K. <ya...@wi...>]

Hi everyone,

About three weeks ago, I sent out an email explaining that five of the
extensions I maintain (Approved Revs, External Data, Header Tabs, Semantic
Drilldown and Semantic Forms) would need to have their global variables
renamed because they start with a non-standard prefix, i.e. not $wg. This
was in light of MediaWiki's new "extension.json" approach to extension
loading, which required variables to start with $wg in order to work.
However, the status of things changed significantly yesterday, when this
change was made to core MediaWiki by "Legoktm":

http://git.wikimedia.org/commitdiff/mediawiki%2Fcore/ff0816cdbb3084da509fa8978debaf1132187d61

It lets you set, within extension.json, the custom prefix you want to use,
instead of it being assumed that you will use $wg.

(I wish I could take credit for this change happening, and maybe I can in
part, but it seems like this was mostly done to accommodate the
WikimediaIncubator extension, which uses the prefix "$wminc".)

So, that means that there's no rush to rename any global variables - and
maybe no reason to do so at all, other than to follow the coding
recommendations. I still plan to rename the Header Tabs variables, because
I think those are rarely-used, and because "$ht" is not a very good global
prefix; but there's no longer a rush to rename any of the other extensions'
variables, and I don't know when I will do so, or if at all.

So, I just wanted to keep everyone updated; and of course, if you still
think the variables should be renamed, or have any other opinion, feel free
to chime in.

-Yaron

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