[Mediawiki-l] PCRE UTF-8 problem- excuse lack of detail.

[Rob Lingelbach]

I have a functioning mediawiki installation, with a lot of extensions  
and users, on a production machine.  I'm moving the whole shebang over  
to a different machine, and have most things worked out, except I'll  
explain what happened, which might be a good script for a sysadmin  
horror film.

1) installed and configured, on new machine, mysql and php-mysql, and  
reinstalled mediawiki (new OS CentOS; old OS Fedora), apache, exim,  
mailman, etc. etc.

2) I presume (excuse the fundamental question) that I have to recreate  
the important databases (wikidb for example) by hand (I used  
phpMyadmin), before reloading mysql with the db dump I did with  
mysqldump.  This I did and the reload did seem to load without problems.

3) I ran into a problem with apache2 complaining that pcre (the perl  
compatible regex library) didn't understand UTF-8 (sorry don't have  
the exact error as you'll understand in a moment).  Yet pcre reported  
it was compiled with UTF-8.

4) it was late.  maybe you're familiar with this story.  I thought,  
well, yum has worked so nicely so far, I'll just reinstall pcre after  
removing it, and see if that helps.

5) yum -y remove pcre

6) sshd gone, exim gone, ....  system hosed.

so, to cut this down to a simple question:

  anyone have any insight for the pcre problem, which will surely crop  
up again after an OS reload?   sorry I can't be more specific about  
the error, the logfiles are inaccessible now.  The pcre problem caused  
mediawiki to issue the error message on the webpage itself, and also  
apache logged it.


--
Rob Lingelbach
rob at colorist.org    http://www.colorist.org/robhome.html