On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 9:29 AM, Gordon Joly gordon.joly@pobox.com wrote:
On 16/12/15 16:01, Chris Koerner wrote:
The folks at the foundation are not copying files and running update.php every time they update Wikipedia. :) They also have a focus on foundation-sponsored projects and improving things where their constituents are. Not a lot of Wiki* editors need a better MediaWiki installer.
I don't believe it is much of a priority - for the foundation or a significant percentage of third-party administrators. Those who are dedicated figure it out, new people have to have a lot of patience - or they are turned away. Which is really sad, IMHO.
Interesting to think that Mediawiki installation and maintenance is a minor part of the what the Foundation do.
Mediawiki is a open source project which any group could fork, maintain and develop a "one button updater". Or just develop it as an add on? Package managers abound!
I don't think forking would be required at all (patches would be welcome), but I think Chris and Gordon are both thinking in a useful direction that a better installation experience should be a concern of the MediaWiki FLOSS project community and not seen as some horrible shortcoming of the Wikimedia Foundation.
An interesting and useful place to start organizing work around improving the experience of deploying and upgrading MediaWiki would be to create a fairly detailed description of the desired end-user experience. This would ideally be created based on the actual requirements of actual MediaWiki users (or potential users). My personal experience in working on deployment tooling for the WMF production and beta clusters as well as MediaWiki-Vagrant tells me that one of the challenges with automating MediaWiki deployment and upgrades is that there are a lot of very different ways to provision and configure MediaWiki. It seems unlikely to me that a one-size-fits-all solution will be found but maybe an 80% solution would be possible that would make things easier for a "average" MediaWiki deployment.
As my signature on this email makes clear I'm an employee of the WMF so please feel free to be skeptical of my comments. I do not speak in any official way for my employer or coworkers on this topic.
Bryan