Include Wikidiff2 PHP extension

[cimurah]

Hola! We are currently working on https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/mediawiki/php/wikidiff2 and we wanted to explore the idea of including patches for Wikidiff2 in Patch Demo. Would it be too complicated to include Wikidiff2 patches? Thank you!

[MatmaRex]

I don't know, but I'd be excited to include it if it can be made to work.

I think the main question is: is it possible to install multiple versions PHP extensions like wikidiff2 at the same time, and choose which one is used depending on the URL being accessed? (I don't know the answer.) This would be required to allow previewing patches to it on Patch Demo, since the individual demo sites are not isolated in any way, they just run in a single boring Debian virtual machine running a boring LAMP stack.

It would be also necessary to make sure that you can build the extension on the same boring Debian installation.

[MatmaRex]

is it possible to install multiple versions PHP extensions like wikidiff2 at the same time, and choose which one is used depending on the URL being accessed?

Some quick research indicates that it isn't, but it may be possible to write a PHP extension to dynamically load PHP extensions. Interesting article I found: https://github.com/CopernicaMarketingSoftware/Documentation/blob/master/PHPCPP/dynamic-loading.md

[cimurah]

Thank you for looking into this @MatmaRex! Sounds like this would require some significant effort to implement. We are going to set up a wiki instance in a VPS so that we can better manage the Wikidiff2 PHP extension version. Thanks again.