On 18 June 2014 03:21, Chris Croome <chris@webarchitects.co.uk> wrote:

> The other thought I had (since I made this mistake recently and was
> baffled for a while) was if you installed VE from git, then make sure
> that after pulling the latest version of VE, you also install VE
> submodules via git submodule update --init.

VisualEditor was downloaded like this:

wget https://codeload.github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-VisualEditor/legacy.tar.gz/REL1_23 -O VisualEditor.tgz

…

and that's the problem. :-(

The VisualEditor MediaWiki extension has a git submodule for VisualEditor itself (which is a standalone HTML editor without the MediaWiki-specific specialisations).

Unfortunately,

Special:ExtensionDistributor blindly gives you a tarball

of the extension git repo, which though fine for most extensions is very much not for VisualEditor, which

without the submodule

completely and utterly broken. The answer is to not use ExtensionDistributor for VisualEditor (I've asked on the talk page if it's possible to disable it somehow until this bug is fixed); in the mean time we've slung a full archive of it on releases.wikimedia.org (sha1:

7cd90271f91b8ded9d6aae3f9166a11d3c7d0ee9

) and I'll put a note on the extension's page that will hopefully help

I'll write a bit of code that visibly errors in the case that the submodule is empty, but that doesn't help people following the very visible (and for this situation wrong) standard instructions on how to install avoiding git. :-(

Incidentally, we just bumped VisualEditor's REL1_23 branch from a slightly archaïc version to the last possible one before the switch from depending on the Parsoid PHP extension (as well as its node service) to the same content in MediaWiki 1.24. This may fix some wider issues, but won't help with that.

James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforrester@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester