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Administration of wbSuite Extensions
Open, Needs TriagePublicSpike

Description

Goal: allow users to run the slimmest version of wbSuite per default (is this true?) and make them owners of the decision of which extensions they need/want. They should also have an easy mechanism to add or remove extensions to their installation

Current Situation: The list of extensions that we deliver at the moment has been chosen by the original team based on what would support the full Wikibase experience. There is no standard process to add extensions and it may get really cumbersome (users need to build and integrate the code themselves. Documentation may not be available for every extension either). The delivered extensions are on per default.

Open Questions:

  • What is the actual user story here?
  • should extension management be on configuration level or package level?
  • Which extensions to add are we really talking about here? anything made for Wikibase? any other code injection?
  • Do we want to make it easy for all the extensions? or we want to create a shortlist of extensions for this?
  • Could users just use the pipeline to build their own containers with the extensions they need?
  • Do we need an ui for that? (this would increase the complexity a lot)
  • What is the upgrade path for users changing the extension set?
  • We could map in all extensions via docker volumes? How does the update path look in this case?
  • Probably standardized dev user way that is properly documented is enough?

Event Timeline

Restricted Application changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Spike". · View Herald TranscriptAug 7 2023, 9:20 AM
Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald Transcript

Reading the content of this ticket, it sounds like this is actually more about "wikibase deploy" than wbsuite, so perhaps the title needs to change?
I'm basing this on recent telegram discussions about what "wikibase suite" means which I'd lovely for everyone to come to some sort of documented decisions about so that we can all more easily communicate about all of these things!

I'm currently «curating» a set of extensions[1] for a multimedia oriented Wikibase (similiar to Structured Data for Commons). The first concern I've found is the need to modify the Docker image to add all required operating system dependencies. I verify I can customize it by myself, but it's a pity to add an intermediate step between the local instance and upstream. These days I'm thinking it could be appropriate to package the dependencies for a set of most stable/popular extensions out there. This would be ortogonal to the release team to include those extensions by default.

About which extensions to add by default, my answer would be almost anything popular, well known, robust and stable. They can not be activated by default if you wish, but this would reduce enormously one of the entry barriers.

[1] for the DHWiki working group recommendations white paper. Reach me by DM/email to know more.