We'd have to standardise some way of noting depedancies

Chad, did we ever standardize on some extension metadata for the installer & configuration stuff? If not it's probably time for us to whip that out and see what we can do, at least for the name/author/url/depedency basics.

Be pretty spiffy to have that in for 1.18's installer; even if most config's still going to be separate a helper for enabling extensions is very useful, and I really want to push the idea of shipping some default extensions like ParserFunctions and WikiEditor.

$wgExtensionCredits['other'][] = array(
'path' => FILE,
'name' => 'Foo',
'author' => array( 'Foo Barson' ),
'url' => 'http://mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Foo',
'descriptionmsg' => 'foo-desc',
'dependencies' => array( 'bar', 'baz', 'lulz' ),
);

?

PHP code is probably not the best idea; to read it we'd need to execute the file, which starts modifying the program state.

We could play tricks with dividing the file up into parts and executing part of it, but honestly that just skeezes me out. :)

Metadata needs to be readable without executing any code, so we can pull it in for all available extensions with no security risk.

ini files ftw!

Waking up this thread as it may still be relveant. Since some time now "extension.json" file can be used to store such a information. There ia actually already a field reserved in the schema.

Change 424967 had a related patch set uploaded (by Legoktm; owner: Legoktm):
[mediawiki/core@master] Handle extension dependencies in the installer

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/424967

Change 424967 merged by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/core@master] Handle extension dependencies in the installer

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/424967