Consider streamlining Composer updates

[yaronkoren]

With #463, Canasta went from calling "composer update" on all relevant extensions and skins (and core MediaWiki) at one time (from the file composer.local.json, which is copied from composer.canasta.json) to calling "composer update" for each such extension and skin (and core) separately, one at a time. This change made the code less hacky and, suprisingly, made it run faster. However, perhaps it makes sense to go back to a streamlined update, by adding lines for the relevant extensions and skins dynamically to the file composer.json, before it's called. This issue is here to discuss this potential change.

[zuobot]

@yaronkoren Could you please clarify how to install extension by "calling "composer update" for each such extension and skin (and core) separately, one at a time", as it does not define on documentation?

By the way, I'm struggling to install the SimpleBlogPage extensions, because it require OOJSPlus extension, that would require to install by composer.

While the OOJSPlus extension is also cannot install by include the composer.json into the composer.local.json, as instruct in the documentation

                        "include": [
                                "../extensions/OOJSPlus/composer.json"
                        ]

The error message when install OOJSPlus is as below:

Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function OOJSPlus\mwsInitComponents() in /var/www/mediawiki/w/user-extensions/OOJSPlus/src/Extension.php:7 Stack trace: #0 /var/www/mediawiki/w/includes/registration/ExtensionRegistry.php(527): OOJSPlus\Extension::callback() #1 /var/www/mediawiki/w/includes/registration/ExtensionRegistry.php(279): ExtensionRegistry->exportExtractedData() #2 /var/www/mediawiki/w/includes/Setup.php(278): ExtensionRegistry->loadFromQueue() #3 /var/www/mediawiki/w/includes/WebStart.php(86): require_once('/var/www/mediaw...') #4 /var/www/mediawiki/w/index.php(44): require('/var/www/mediaw...') #5 {main} thrown in /var/www/mediawiki/w/user-extensions/OOJSPlus/src/Extension.php on line 7

Hope you clarifiation on composer update command will help. Thank you.

[vedmaka]

<..> to calling "composer update" for each such extension and skin (and core) separately, one at a time <..>
This change made the code less hacky <..>
<..> makes sense to go back to a streamlined update, by adding lines for the relevant extensions and skins dynamically to the file composer.json

This is definitely a good idea to migrate back to the use of the composer merge plugin. Because otherwise, with each extension and skin getting its own copy of the vendor packages, we:

a) Lose the dependency tree integrity (every extension and skin builds up its own dependency tree)
b) Risk of facing dependency conflicts at runtime instead of install time (without a unified dependency graph, there could be no proper dependency resolution)
c) Lastly, just wasting more space installing the same deps again and again