[Fusionforge-general] On packaging Mediawiki 1.23 for Debian jessie

Thorsten Glaser t.glaser at tarent.de
Fri Sep 26 15:28:55 CEST 2014


Hi everyone,

I can possibly work up to about four person-days within the
next four weeks on this, pending an OK from the project lead
of my current for-customer project on Monday. I’ve asked for
this since nobody else is apparently working on it, and we
use Mediawiki in our inhouse FusionForge installations anyway.

I expect we will have to update:

• src:mediawiki
• all extensions
  – src:mediawiki-extensions
  – maybe src:mediawiki-math
  – maybe php-wikidiff2
• src:fusionforge

From the FusionForge weekly IRC meeting today, I expect to
see FusionForge 5.3 in Debian jessie. Roland and Sylvain,
please do not upload anything to Debian sid which you do
not want to see in jessie, from now, so I can work with
sid to make FusionForge match Mediawiki. (This means to
please not package FusionForge 5.4/6.0 for Debian until
this is finished, and to possibly help me with testing
and hacking the ff-plugin-mw integration.)

I’ll look at src:mediawiki-extensions, although I cannot
test all extensions. I’ll not look at php-wikidiff2.

This means that, once I prepare new packages (starting
in experimental, I think), I will need volunteer testing
and feedback, from admins as well as actual users. We
are on a very tight timeframe, and I wish to have this
all finished within the next 28 days, starting Monday.

Failure to do so will mean shipping Mediawiki 1.19 in
jessie, which is currently upstream’s oldstable and
fading LTS. Mediawiki 1.23 is upstream’s current LTS;
we have an agreement from upstream to support 1.19 for
the lifetime of wheezy, and I guess they’d be willing
to extend the same for 1.23 and jessie, but I’d not
want to ask them to do that for 1.19. The delivery of
the security updates from upstream to Debian (both
stable and unstable) has been good so far, with only
a few minor bumps on the road (releases come out when
I go to bed, roughly, and I do not always have time,
and certain people submit unwanted bugreports about
new versions nobody asked for), and no concerns from
the stable-security team so far, so it’s been productive.

Everyone who’s relying on Mediawiki in Debian should
consider agreeing to help test it and drop me an eMail
(to this my work address) stating so.

If anyone’s got a rough overview of what changed between
1.19 and 1.23 for/from a packager’s PoV, thank you for
pointing it out to me.

Let me reiterate a bit of what I normally test:

Mediawiki not stand-alone, but in a multi-site scenario,
with FusionForge replacing a bit of its theme (we use
Monobook) and about all of its auth mechanisms, and
PostgreSQL as the database, plus most of the extensions
from src:mediawiki-extensions, plus src:mediawiki-math.

I have no experience in setting up a standalone mediawiki
(and do not particularily wish to gain that), and I will
absolutely not touch MySQL, which is what upstream recommends
in lieu of a database. This means I test a very non-default
setup. Our inhouse FusionForge is 5.1-based, but for Debian
I’ll also test with the 5.3 from jessie/sid/experimental.

I’m not formally the maintainer of src:mediawiki (only of
src:mediawiki-extensions, and even then only a comaintainer),
but considering that one of them doesn’t do it either, and
the other’s got a bouncing eMail address, I’m willing to
step forward and do my share of the work.

bye,
//mirabilos
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