MediaWiki-l October 2012

mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org

62 participants
57 discussions

Apache KeepAlive on or off?
by David Gerard 15 Oct '12

15 Oct '12

(I have just accepted root on rationalwiki.org and am looking around in slight horror. I will be sending a few messages like this.) Apache comes with KeepAlive on by default. I am unconvinced this is actually a good idea. I just switched it off and it appears to have no ill effects, and the server has 400MB more free memory. (Ubuntu 10.04 Linode with 4GB RAM. Six wikis, Lucene search being really fat.) The only mention I can see on mediawiki.org is in http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Newcomers_guide_to_installing_on_Windo… , where it's one of the defaults they say nothing about. Apache connections are really pretty damn cheap these days. Is KeepAlive actually a good or bad thing for MediaWiki? - d.

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What can cause occasional blank watchlists?
by David Gerard 15 Oct '12

15 Oct '12

I'm getting reports on rationalwiki.org of occasional blank watchlists. The symptoms are that a completely empty page loads immediately. It's running 1.19.1 in Ubuntu 10.04 with Apache 2.2.14-ubuntu. Of course, I changed *two* things last night: (a) cut max memory for PHP from 256MB to 64MB (b) switched off KeepAlive in Apache. (I'm quite keen to keep both of these, as the server CPU and memory went *right* down.) The confusing thing is the Apache logs don't show any "200 0" for Special:Watchlist, at all. So either it's serving something that renders as a blank page, or something before Apache, which should be nothing whatsoever, is showing a blank page. I see a few "200 0" for other pages. A bit over 1% of all connections give a 408 request timeout - but the request timeout is 300 seconds, which is quite huge enough. I've asked people having the problem to email me with their IP and the time, so I can go log-grovelling. But has anyone else seen this, and what caused it? - d.

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Tentative specs for MW releases
by Mark A. Hershberger 15 Oct '12

15 Oct '12

I said I would lay out my thoughts regarding MW releases this weekend, so here goes. First: I want to provide a regular schedule so users know what to expect, but something that a volunteer (me, for now) can achieve. Second: I want to provide something that Linux distributors can incorporate into their distributions. To fulfill the first point, I think a release twice a year -- like Ubuntu releases -- makes a lot of sense. This schedule also works for Linux distributors like Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSuSE Since I started out using Debian (which has now adopted a 2 year freeze cycle), I think it also makes sense to provide LTS support. Platonides and I (but mostly Platonides) have been working with the Debian developers to get 1.19 into Wheezy which was frozen in June. With that in mind, here is what I propose: 1.18.0 | Security updates till 1.20 1.19.x | April 2012 (LTS) 1.20.0 | October 2012 1.21.0 | April 2013 (Start in May) 1.22.0 | October 2013 (Start in September) 1.23.0 | April 2014 (LTS) 1.24.0 | October 2014 1.25.0 | April 2015 1.26.0 | October 2015 1.27.0 | April 2016 (LTS) LTS releases will updates until (at least) the next LTS release. This means security updates, but other updates that don't require schema changes if people are interested in providing them. Since a couple of people have put the 1.20.0 milestone on a handful of bugs, I'm assuming now that they think those are worth merging to the 1.20 series. I'd like to get the fixes backported to 1.19 as well, if possible. Well, that's pretty much it what I was thinking. How does this sound to you guys? -- http://hexmode.com/ 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>

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Display of <math> using LaTeXML
by Moritz Schubotz 15 Oct '12

15 Oct '12

Summary: I'm looking for people to discuss about the parsing of math. Dear all, I came up with a proposal for a new version of the rendering of the <math> tag. I proposed to use LaTeXML to convert the LaTeX expressions in the math tag to MathML. If the browser is not capable of displaying MathML I use MathJaX to display the MathML output in the browser. My implementation (the LaTeXML branch) has only a few very little differences in contrast to the master branch. I have the feeling that the php code of the math extensions could be improved. For example I'd suggest to put all the texvc related stuff to another class. Furthermore I was thinking about an asynchronous rendering of the formula, which would speed up page loading time especially for major edits. At http://wiki.physikerwelt.de/images/text_math_search.pdf you find the draft of a paper where I describe in detail what I changed and why it is an improvement. The paper will appear soon in the postconference proceedings of CICM2012. Now I want to figure out, who is working on the development of the math extension, and who wants to discuss with me about our ideas. I'm open to any kind of suggestions and questions. Best regards Moritz -- Mit freundlichen Grüßen Moritz Schubotz Telefon (Büro): +49 30 314 22784 Telefon (Privat):+49 30 488 27330 E-Mail: schubotz(a)itp.physik.tu-berlin.de Web: http://www.physikerwelt.de Skype: Schubi87 ICQ: 200302764 Msn: Moritz(a)Schubotz.de

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The file cache is brilliant
by David Gerard 14 Oct '12

14 Oct '12

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:File_cache Enabled this on rationalwiki.org and the results are amazing. The site is just ridiculously fast to browse logged-out, and I'm almost looking forward to our next Reddit-dotting. Is there any reason this is not enabled by default? (Is the possibility of dynamic templates not being re-rendered enough reason?) - d.

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Has anyone beaten LiquidThreads 2 into usable condition on 1.19?
by David Gerard 14 Oct '12

14 Oct '12

rationalwiki.org was foolish enough to start using the experimental LQT2. So of course the project was abandoned and we're stuck with a pile of content in LQT, and it broke in subtle and awful ways when we upgraded from 1.16 to 1.19. Symptoms we're seeing: * The loader gif for the toolbar keeps spinning. (The request actually completes successfully.) * CSS and JS load late. (Page looks awful until then.) * Takes *ages* to load (could be browser, could be server-side) - enough so that people avoid using it. One thing I notice is it's quite fat on memory - PHP max_memory was 64MB, LQT was regularly running out of it (is happier at 96MB) Server: MW 1.19.1 tarball, PHP 5.3.2-1ubuntu4.18 (apache2handler), MySQL 5.1.63-0ubuntu0.10.04.1, Ubuntu 10.04 on amd64 Linode. Default skin is Vector. I realise that LQT2 is unmaintained, LQT3 isn't finished either and basically we get to keep both pieces. But has anyone beaten LQT2 into usable condition on 1.19? Failing that, is there any tool to convert LQT2 discussions into a format that can be parsed by something that's maintained? - d.

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Request: dynamic sidebar (English and German)
by GIC-Grepolis＠gmx.de 13 Oct '12

13 Oct '12

Hello everyone, My native language is German so my English is not very well. I still hope you understand me. I send a German and an English version of my request. I want to create a dynamic sidebar for my wiki (http://wiki.de.grepolis.com/wiki/Hauptseite). Wikipedia has this dynamic sidebar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) I mean. With dynamic sidebar I mean that there are "categories" in the sidebar (in the Wikipedia sidebar "Interaction" e. g.) and they are collapseble and expandable. The Vector extension offers a dynamic sidebar (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Vector#CollapsibleLeftNav). We have installed the Vector extension (http://wiki.de.grepolis.com/wiki/Spezial:Version) but the sidebar has not changed automatically. Can you say what I have to do that this works? Just the best for you! ----- German version: Hallo zusammen, ich würde gerne für mein Wiki (http://wiki.de.grepolis.com/wiki/Hauptseite) eine dynamische Sidebar haben. Wikipedia hat so eine (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptseite). Mit "dynamischer Sidebar" meine ich eine Sidebar, bei der man die "Kategorien" (bei Wikipedia z. B. "Mitmachen") ein- und ausklappen kann. Die Vector-Erweiterung bietet diese dynamische Sidebar (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Vector#CollapsibleLeftNav) und ich habe sie deshalb schon installiert (http://wiki.de.grepolis.com/wiki/Spezial:Version). Nun ist aber die Sidebar nicht automatisch gleich dynamisch, wie ich sie gerne hätte. Was muss ich jetzt noch tun, damit sie wirklich dynamisch wird? Beste Grüße!

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Re: [MediaWiki-l] 1.20 blocker bugs and code merges
by Mark A. Hershberger 12 Oct '12

12 Oct '12

I've been pretty busy with other work all week and, as a result, I haven't had time to look at the 1.20 release. On September 30 (2 weeks ago) I sent out a message with what I saw as the blocker bugs at that point. Only one of those bugs does not yet have any sort of resolution on it. > * https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/35894 -- Reports of secret key > generation "hanging" on windows` At this point, I think we should add a "known issues" section to the release notes and plan to have a 1.20.1 release with this so that I can put together an RC1 tarball tomorrow for you guys to test. That said, some bugs have been added to the 1.20.0 milestone, but unless there is a major objection, I'd like to target those to the 1.20.1 release so that we don't hold up the 1.20.0 release any longer. These bugs could be listed in the "known issues" section of the release notes with a statement that we're planning a 1.20.1 release. And, speaking of plans, I will have time to write up my ideas for a release schedule tomorrow. This will mean plans for future releases as well as support for 1.19 and 1.18. Mark.

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Any extension for making page recomendations?
by Marcelo Chiaradía 11 Oct '12

11 Oct '12

Hello everyone, Im need some way of making recomendations in my wiki, so that, I could point a user to a particular page, according to some criteria. I was thinking about keeping track of all the navigated pages, so I could use this data for recomendations, or something like that. Is there any extension to do something like this? Thanks in advance, Marcelo.

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Anyone using ClamAV with Mediawiki?
by John Horne 11 Oct '12

11 Oct '12

Hello, I am running Mediawiki 1.19.2 on a CentOS 6.3 box, and have installed the ClamAV 0.97.6 package (using yum). I have also set $wgAntivirus to 'clamav' in my LocalSettings.php file. However, when trying to upload an image this gave me an error code of 127. (Checking the image locally it passes clamav with no problem.) I then modified $wgAntivirusSetup to use the absolute pathname to 'clamscan'. This now gives me a 126 error code. I am now a bit stuck. Not too sure what the problem is. The debug log shows: ============== UploadBase::detectVirus: running virus scan: /usr/bin/clamscan --no-summary '/tmp/phpa5rFd7' wfShellExec: /bin/bash '/var/www/html/mediawiki/bin/ulimit4.sh' 180 102400 102400 '/usr/bin/clamscan --no-summary '\''/tmp/phpa5rFd7'\'' 2>&1' UploadBase::detectVirus: failed to scan /tmp/phpa5rFd7 (code 126). ============== So 'clamscan' seems to run okay via mediawiki, but fails for some reason. Anyone any ideas? I have been trying to find what the 126 error code actually means, but ClamAV doesn't seem to provide a list of error codes anywhere. Thanks, John. -- John Horne Tel: +44 (0)1752 587287 Plymouth University, UK Fax: +44 (0)1752 587001

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MediaWiki-l October 2012