With the near-term goal of deploying minimal MediaWiki containers alongside services in the release pipeline for the purpose of e2e testing services, and the eventual goal of testing and deploying MediaWiki and its extensions via the pipeline to production, we'll need to somehow have Blubber install MediaWiki dependencies (both libraries and extensions) in some sane manner.
We could potentially build support directly into Blubber but this coupled approach seems wrong given Blubber's current design (stateless and preferring delegation to package managers over intimate knowledge of resident applications), and it also would seem like a missed opportunity to simplify the installation of MediaWiki extensions through something standard like composer.
Some ideas so far:
1. Try to wrangler composer into natively installing extensions in addition to aggregate library dependencies (through the merge plugin).
2. Write a composer plugin that understands the [[ https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Extension.json/Schema | extension.json schema ]] and can recursively resolve and install extensions. Note that the extension.json schema does not currently allow you to specify test/dev dependencies.
3. Write some wrapper tooling that can recursively resolve and install MW extensions and leave library dependencies to composer.
In any case, Blubber would provide configuration to properly invoke the underlying dependency manager(s) much the same way it provides configuration for Node and Python dependency managers (npm and pip respectively).