Requests for comment/Third-party components

Request for comment (RFC)

Third-party components
Component	General
Creation date	26 November 2013
Author(s)	Tyler Romeo
Document status	in draft

Introduction

MediaWiki contains a number of bare-bones components made to fit specific needs in core. Some examples of these are logging using wfErrorLog, sending HTTP requests using the HttpFunctions class, etc. In each of these cases, just barely enough functionality was implemented to fit the needs of the application, and a lot of the time the code goes unmaintained so long as it keeps working.

At the same time, other open source projects have created entire libraries that do the same thing as the MediaWiki components, except are better maintained and much more functional. This RFC aims to replace one or more MediaWiki components with third-party open source components.

Possible replacements

MediaWiki component	Replacement library	Difficulty	Functionality advantages / disadvantages
HttpFunctions	Guzzle	Easy	RFC-compliant support for caching, cookies, and URL templating Integration with PHP streaming API
UserMailer	Swift_Mailer	Easy	More transport destination options Support for failover (bug 46640?)
wfErrorLog / wfDebug / wfDebugLog	Monolog	Medium	Logs to pretty much everything (syslog, files, UDP socket, email, database, the browser) Allows different logging formats (HTML, plaintext, etc.)
MediaWiki's global variable configuration	Symfony Config	Hard	Need I say any more
WebRequest / WebResponse	Symfony HttpFoundation	Hard	More abstractions for HTTP headers Easier mocking of fake requests Better object-oriented abstraction of Response objects Might not integrate well with File Upload system Using the Response class requires more integration with OutputPage
wfShellExec	Symfony Process	Incompatible	Allows asynchronous process execution Is not integrated with logging system like wfShellExec is Does not have memory or CPU limits like wfShellExec does
HTMLForm	Symfony Validator	Medium	Not a replacement, but a supplement; Validator only does one part of HTMLForm Has a lot more validation filters built in
Maintenance	Symfony Console	Medium	Handles different verbosity levels Allows for console coloring Supports sub-commands

See also

• Symfony Components