On 05/22/2012 11:29 AM, Thorsten Glaser wrote: Sam Reed has been supporting versions back to 1.17 lately, but there is no official policy. I'm looking at what to do going forward. Rob Laphnier, as Platform Director for MediaWiki, has said he thinks WMF shouldn't be in the tarball publishing business. Since I'm leaving Wikimedia and I've developed some good relationships with WMF's developers as well as the MediaWiki community, I've been talking to Sam and Rob (mostly Sam) about what how to handle this *without* forking MediaWiki. If I do end up taking over the tarball distribution, I plan on working with a team of volunteers to manage this. This team may include WMF employees like Sam, Chad Horohoe and Tim, to help the transition. Sam has said that handling multiple versions is problematic and time consuming, but if we have people interested in supporting older versions (like Debian Stable's 1.15), then I think it makes sense to include those in the "official" updates. If we can find someone (you, Thorsten?) to support 1.15 then adding support for 1.16 seems straightforward. The great thing about the WMF's move to git is that we can easily maintain a branch for 1.15 and 1.16. With Gerrit, you can contribute patches or review other volunteer's patches. As the old adage says: "Many hands make light work." I've seen the discussion, but not followed it closely. I'll try to look in today and figure out what the issues are and if I can help. -- http://hexmode.com/ Find peace within yourself and there will be peace on heaven and earth. -- Abba Isaac

On 05/22/2012 12:10 PM, Thorsten Glaser wrote: So, 1.19 is out now. Can we use that one for our first LTS? FWIW, MediaWiki is probably going to be moving to a quarterly release cycle. This is because it has always been based off of the release cycle WMF uses and WMF has moved to rolling out new code to Wikipedia and its sister sites every other week with some discussion of going weekly. The Math extension on English Wikipedia (and others) now has experimental support for MathJax. But I did look at the Math extension previously. I'll poke at it today. -- http://hexmode.com/ Find peace within yourself and there will be peace on heaven and earth. -- Abba Isaac

On 05/22/2012 01:05 PM, Thorsten Glaser wrote: I tried to do it: http://mah.everbody.org/math.tgz Who should I get to review this? -- http://hexmode.com/ Find peace within yourself and there will be peace on heaven and earth. -- Abba Isaac

Sorry I haven't had chance to join this discussion yet. Real life is currently highly demanding :( On 2012-05-22 18:05, Thorsten Glaser wrote: I would like to 1.19 to be the version we ship in Wheezy. However, with the freeze so close we need to consider carefully whether there's enough time. Maybe it would be wise to get 1.18 tested and into unstable first so we at least have a recent version in, and then see if we get 1.19 in its place in time (should be quicker to achieve that second part if the first is done)? Either way it does make me nervous that upstream would move to quarterly releases without a long-term branch. We've already seen from the 1.15 tree that backporting fixes over that long a time frame gets progressively harder. If upstream releases more often they are presumably also only going to backport fixes for a shorter time. If you're prepared to support 1.19 as an LTS then I suggest we try our hardest to make that the version we ship in Debian. I didn't get any response to my call for testing of 1.18 though, so I guess we could shove it into unstable and see who complains (when the math replacement is ready). (For upstream readers: we're talking about a practical period of three years Debian security support here, give or take - plus the six months or so of frozen time yet to come, during which we're not supposed to put anything but targetted fixes in.) I am working on a new source for mediawiki-math which will take the place of the currently bundled extension. That should remove some of the barrier to getting 1.18 into unstable. Thorsten, are there any other major obstacles for you and Roland with your FF hats on? I plan to ship mediawiki-math as an empty transitional package, mediawiki-extensions-math to replace it (this is consistent with other extensions then) and contain the arch:all parts, and mediawiki-math-texvc or something with the arch:any parts. Please object now if you forsee any problem with that. -- Jonathan Wiltshire jmw(a)debian.org Debian Developer http://people.debian.org/~jmw 4096R: 0xD3524C51 / 0A55 B7C5 1223 3942 86EC 74C3 5394 479D D352 4C51