Greetings,
I hope everyone has had a great holiday season.
I've been working on a new extension to allow for non-destructive image
editing and annotation.
Please help me fix issues and make improvements. I am leaning heavily on
GitHub copilot so I would love to have some experts review my code and
documentation. I am not nearly as qualified as most of the users here.
There will be issues. Please be patient and kind.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Layershttps://github.com/slickdexic/Layers
I look forward to some valuable feedback.
Thank you,
Paul Vodrazka
As per the MediaWiki version lifecycle[1], I would like to announce the
formal end of life (EOL) of MediaWiki 1.39 as of December 31, 2025.
1.39.17 is expected to be the last release for this branch.
This means that MediaWiki 1.39 will no longer receive maintenance or
security backports. It is therefore strongly discouraged that you continue
to use it.
It is recommended to upgrade either to the next LTS, 1.43, which will be
supported until the end of December 2027. Or to either MediaWiki 1.44,
which will be supported until the end of July 2026, or to MediaWiki 1.45,
which will be supported until the end of December 2026.
Thanks!
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Version_lifecycle
Hi all,
This week, either on Tuesday or Wednesday, we will be issuing a security
and maintenance release to all supported branches of MediaWiki.
The new releases will be:
- 1.39.16
- 1.43.6
- 1.44.3
- 1.45.1
This will also resolve security issues in bundled extensions, along with
bug fixes included for maintenance reasons.
These security issues also affect many unsupported versions of MediaWiki.
We will make the fixes available in the respective release branches and
master in git. Tarballs will be available for the above mentioned point
releases as well.
A summary of some of the security fixes that have gone into non-bundled
MediaWiki extensions will also follow later.
As a reminder, MediaWiki 1.35 became end of life (EOL) in December 2023,
MediaWiki 1.40 became EOL in June 2024, MediaWiki 1.41 became EOL in
December 2024 and MediaWiki 1.42 became EOL in June 2025.
MediaWiki 1.39 (the old LTS before 1.43) becomes EOL at the end of the
month - December 2025. It is strongly recommended to upgrade to 1.43 (the
next LTS after 1.39), which will be supported until December 2027.
A formal EOL email for MediaWiki 1.39 will come later this month. This is
because as per our support policy, it is to be supported until the end of
the month, but we are not expecting any further changes to be made to the
branch.
More information on these timelines can be viewed on the Version lifecycle
page at [1].
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Version_lifecycle
Hello,
As part of simplifying and modernizing the database load balancing logic in
MediaWiki, we have now deprecated several functionalities in rdbms library:
If you're writing MediaWiki code that involves getting a database
connection:
- Trying to get a replica with a group (with the exception of "dump" and
"vslow") is discouraged.
- Starting from 1.45, attempts to get a replica with any group except
"vslow" or "dump" will trigger a deprecation warning
- Starting from 1.46, attempts to get a replica that is not vslow/dump
will be just ignored and a replica from the general group will be returned.
If you're maintaining a MediaWiki setup with more than one replica:
- Starting from 1.46, MediaWiki load balancer configuration ignores
"groupLoads" and "groupLoadsBySection". So if you have replicas pooled in
such groups only, they will be effectively depooled.
- Also from 1.46: In every general set of replicas, rdbms library
designates the replica with lowest weight as the "vslow" replica and
directs queries with vslow/dump group accordingly.
- If you have many replicas and rely on groups, it's better to enable
"shuffleSharding" instead (example
<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/operations/mediawiki-config/+/1193108>).
This will force rdbms library to show only three randomly (but
consistently) picked replicas to each client IP which would improve cache
locality and fault tolerance. This feature is available from 1.45 onwards.
If you have any questions. Feel free to comment on the ticket:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T405087
Best
--
*Amir Sarabadani (he/him)*
Staff Database Architect
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>