Version numbers for MediaWiki extensions

Fremantle

· Wikimedia · MediaWiki · versioning · SemVer ·

The WikiEditor extension got a new release in June this year, version 0.5.4.

But it didn't really, because we don't treat version numbers of extensions as significant; they're really only actually used when another extension needs to declare a dependency (which I'm assuming is what happened this time). Some extensions don't ever get a version number (e.g. Cite).

This new release was only a point release because we don't follow Semantic Versioning (although the number does have to be valid for Composer), so it's just important to increase the number, it doesn't matter what to or by how much. The previous release was in April 2020, version 0.5.3. The changes between those two versions are considerable (including the Realtime Preview feature that my team worked on!). So there would be an argument to be made that the version number increase should've been more — but this isn't SemVer, as I say. And if it were, it's still a pre-1.0 release so really we'd have only gone to 0.6.0.

Anyway, all I'm getting at is that I think WikiEditor, that lovely toolbar (and more!) that has been helping us edit wikitext for more than 13 years, should at some point be given a nice round 1.0 release number. Even if it doesn't mean anything. :-)