Hi Mark,
I'm adding Patrick Uiterwijk to the Cc, as he's been attacking the package upgrade as well in the last weeks.
The main obstacle is a patch that ensured using a single codebase for multiple instances of mediawiki w/o touching/extending the LocalSettings.php configuration. The patch was splitting the use of $IP to two variables holding the code path and the data path respectively.
I've examined the current other solutions of doing so (e.g. as outlined on http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Wiki_family but none really provides a single source-multiple data solution w/ arbitrary install location for the instances and no special handling in LocalSettings.php.
Ideally we'd modify mediawiki in Fedora/RHEL to
o allow for concurrent installs of different mediawiki versions o allow simple imports/migration of unpackaged mediawiki sites w/o changes to LocalSettings.php
Would it be acceptable to mediawiki devs to split the use of $IP between code and data instances? In that case we should try to patch upstream into 1.20 this change, so all distributrions could simply use a central code/multiple data farm setup.
Thanks, Axel.
On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 03:52:57PM -0400, Mark A. Hershberger wrote:
Axel Thimm and Fedora Release Engineering,
I'm looking for the person in charge of packaging MediaWiki for Fedora. From the recent changelog, it looks like Axel is that person.
I'd like to start working with you to get the MediaWiki 1.19 series packaged for Fedora and use that as a basis for working with other RPM-based distributions.
Even though MW 1.20 is about to be released, I'd like to use 1.19 so that we can make it an LTS release and collaborate on supporting it.
We (a group of MediaWiki developers, especially Platonides) have been working with the Debian developers to get 1.19 into Wheezy and have been able to help them resolve some issues more quickly because of our familiarity with MediaWiki.
I hope that you'll see the mutual benefit that could come from collaborating on MediaWiki packaging.
What do we need to do to get the process started?
Any time you have "one overriding idea", and push your idea as a superior ideology, you're going to be wrong. ... The fact is, reality is complicated -- Linus Torvalds http://hexm.de/mc