Change Details

We have a couple conditional libraries that are not required for MediaWiki to work but make it work better. They are listed in the `suggest` block of `composer.json` (except PsySH which was put into `require-dev` largely to work around this problem), and the user is supposed to install them manually. This raises some problems: * How is the user supposed to know which version of the library is compatible with the calling code? * Likewise, how does the user learn about when the library needs to be updated? * How can the library be installed in a convenient way, given that out homegrown composer-merge-plugin-based usage pattern does not really work with `composer require`.

We have a couple optional libraries that are not required for MediaWiki to work but make it work better (like Monolog for logging), or are required for some non-fundamental feature to work (like PsySH for `shell.php`), or are required for a certain type of infrastructure (like wikimedia/avro when using Kafka as the log backend). They are listed in the `suggest` block of `composer.json` (except PsySH which was put into `require-dev` largely to work around this problem), and the user is supposed to install them manually. This raises some problems: * How is the user supposed to know which version of the library is compatible with the calling code? * Likewise, how does the user learn about when the library needs to be updated? * How can the library be installed in a convenient way, given that out homegrown composer-merge-plugin-based usage pattern does not really work with `composer require`.

We have a couple condioptional libraries that are not required for MediaWiki to work but make it work better (like Monolog for logging), or are required for some non-fundamental feature to work (like PsySH for `shell.php`), or are required for a certain type of infrastructure (like wikimedia/avro when using Kafka as the log backend). They are listed in the `suggest` block of `composer.json` (except PsySH which was put into `require-dev` largely to work around this problem), and the user is supposed to install them manually. This raises some problems: * How is the user supposed to know which version of the library is compatible with the calling code? * Likewise, how does the user learn about when the library needs to be updated? * How can the library be installed in a convenient way, given that out homegrown composer-merge-plugin-based usage pattern does not really work with `composer require`.