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