Proper SemanticMediaWiki initialization leads to Fatal error

[vedmaka]

Reproducible on Canasta's latest image tag, which is 1.43.5-20251202-cd387ac at the moment of the bug report

Adding the following lines that should enable the SemanticMediaWiki extension (per docs) to the LocalSettings.php file:

wfLoadExtension( 'SemanticMediaWiki' );
enableSemantics( 'wiki-example.com' );

Is leading to the following Fatal error:

Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function enableSemantics() in 
/mediawiki/config/LocalSettings.php:142 Stack trace: #0 
/var/www/mediawiki/w/CanastaDefaultSettings.php(104): require_once() #1 
/var/www/mediawiki/w/LocalSettings.php(8): require_once('...') #2 
/var/www/mediawiki/w/includes/Setup.php(222): require_once('...') #3 
/var/www/mediawiki/w/includes/WebStart.php(85): require_once('...') #4 
/var/www/mediawiki/w/index.php(50): require('...') #5
{main} thrown in /mediawiki/config/LocalSettings.php on line 142

The enableSemantics() global function is not available during LocalSettings.php call because per-extension composer install in https://github.com/CanastaWiki/CanastaBase/blob/master/_sources/scripts/extensions-skins.php#L89 does affect the global autoloader, and thus the function never gets loaded until the extension itself is loaded (which happens much later than the wfLoadExtension() function call)

[yaronkoren]

I seem to remember we ran into this problem before... and I also somehow remember that just removing the enableSemantics() call "fixed" the problem. Is that the case for you also - does SMW work correctly if you remove enableSemantics()?

[vedmaka]

There seem to be some moves towards deprecating the need to call enableSemantics() in SMW, but as of today, it's still mandatory per SMW documentation. Let's ask the authors SemanticMediaWiki/SemanticMediaWiki#5188 (comment)