I would have loved to see the changes go into the Editcount extension. Now we have two similar extensions doing very similar things. Does not sound appealing.
Topic on Extension talk:EditCountNeue
Thing is that this extension totally removes the includable special page, thus cannot provide a smooth transition, therefore in a short term this wouldn't be merged into the original extension.
Hmm, not sure why we could not have both, includable special page and parser function?
The biggest problem that the author and their friends are experiencing is that by including special page to retrieve the number, these number cannot be read by other parser functions (like you cannot do calculation at all), so, since includable special page doesn't work well with other usage, they simply move the original functionality of includable special page to the new parser function.
The author also replied to me that the difference between two extensions is quite big, thus no way to merge them.
Thanks for the info. I understand the rationale and do not object to it.
The reason I was asking is that in the past I have seen many extensions being created serving similar functionality which in the end cannibalized each other and resulted in all of them to degrade eventually due to the lack of maintenance stamina. It would have been nice to reduce this potential problem from the start by focusing more developers to one extension.
Anyhow since the difference under the hood is too big it indeed does not make sense to somehow merge them at this point.
The author also plans to add an API entry point for edit count, so just stay tuned.
Probably a nice extra feature indeed.