Jan Steinman wrote:
I believe the OP suggested export/import because they had fallen way behind, and lacked confidence in an upgrade process that is generally designed for Wikipedia's needs of strictly sequential incremental upgrades.
I am in the same situation, running 1.3. Short of upgrading to 1.4, then 1.5, then 1.6... I don't believe this posting really addresses strategies for someone who is way behind to "catch up." The further you are behind, the more likely something will break, no matter how carefully one follows the instructions for upgrading from 1.13.1 to 1.13.2.
Anyone have any good strategies going from 1.3 to current? I'm planning on making a complete copy, accessed from a new URL, and trying the upgrade on that. But I'm doubtful that such an upgrade will be fruitful.
I put the answer to this question in the upgrade FAQ, and since then I've answered it about another 5 times on mediawiki-l.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:FAQ#Upgrading
I don't know how many more times I'm going to have to say it.
Upgrades for 1.3 to 1.13 were tested automatically prior to the release of 1.13 using an automated upgrade test:
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/release-tools/upgradeTest.py?view=markup
There are no open bug reports regarding upgrading from 1.3 to 1.13. The vast majority of reports indicate that it works just fine.
Upgrading may take a long time. Back up your wiki in case the upgrade script is aborted halfway through and leaves your wiki in an intermediate state.
The upgrade script is inherently incremental. The updaters.inc file has a large list of database operations which have been steadily accumulating since the first MediaWiki release. They are run in the order in which they were added. Occasionally obsolete or redundant upgrades are removed. So running each upgrader in turn is effectively equivalent to running the most recent one.
Some of the old upgraders had bugs. We fixed them in later major releases. If you run the old upgraders, you risk encountering unfixed bugs in them.
Old upgraders are not supported and we will ignore bug reports against them. If you encounter a bug when upgrading directly from 1.3 to 1.13, we will fix it. If you encounter a bug when upgrading from 1.3 to 1.4, we will ignore you.
-- Tim Starling