[Mediawiki-l] Default path settings

[Ichiro Watanabe]

Platonides wrote:
> I see what you mean. I don't think this can be "fixed", since you need
> to wait after LocalSettings has been included to set those variables
> which rely on other variables. So that leaves us with the option of
> clarifying the documentation. As someone who has fallen on it, how do
> you think it would be expressed to note that the default value that we
> are reporting on those pages won't be effective until after
> LocalSettings execution?

Thanks for listening.
I suppose a template with an appropriate wording, applied to all such
$wgVariables that have this funny default behaviour, would be good.
Mr.Z-man recently had a stab at this with

    http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgLogo
    <small>(note: set dynamically in Setup.php, not in
DefaultSettings.php)</small>

but to be honest I'm not sure if that clarifies the whole situation.

I would like to take one step back and ask a couple of questions

1. Do all $wgVariable defaults behave this way, or are there two kinds
of defaults, one that gets set before LocalSettings and one after?

2. In any case, who is actually interested in the latter class (i.e.
default values that are set *after* LocalSettings)? From my short
experience, the average installer and admin is not. Maybe we need to
make it clear that these default values are for use of extension
developers (just guessing here) as opposed to administrators. In fact,
if this is the case, then I would probably remove altogether this
confusing default documentation from what is the *user* (i.e. admin)
manual of MediaWiki - as opposed to what would be a developer's
manual.

Then of course we need to make sure that there are no inappropriate
references to these variable in prominent documents like the FAQ etc.
By inappropriate I mean stuff like the first block removed with this
change

    http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Manual%3AFAQ&action=historysubmit&diff=282847&oldid=282803

Thanks