On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 6:41 AM, Vincent Baier (RIT Student) < vjb4501@rit.edu> wrote:
Also, I have been trying to find this for some time, but is there any place where the ubuntu packages are ACTUALLY documented?
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MediaWiki It's the package maintainers' responsibility to document their packages (although there are some attempts on MW.org anyway: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Installing_Mediawiki_on_Ubuntu_10.04 )
On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 6:41 AM, Vincent Baier (RIT Student) < vjb4501@rit.edu> wrote:
They rarely follow the standard configuration of what they contain (apache, mysql, etc) and the absurd number of symbolic links in many of them makes their folder structure almost impossible to navigate around and determine which files correspond to the original configuration files of the software.
Most developers will recommend that you not install MediaWiki through an OS package; it sounds like you've already figured out some of the reasons. If you want to spare yourself further trouble, it shouldn't be too hard to migrate from the package to a normal installation: *Download MediaWiki: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download_from_SVN (you don't have to use SVN here, but it will make it easy to keep the wiki up-to-date) *Copy LocalSettings.php and the images directory from the package installation to your new installation *Get rid of the package stuff from LocalSettings.php. From a quick comparison, it looks like the stuff you should remove is: define('MW_INSTALL_PATH','/var/lib/mediawiki');
and
# debian specific include: if (is_file("/etc/mediawiki-extensions/extensions.php")) { include( "/etc/mediawiki-extensions/extensions.php" ); } (I can't guarantee there isn't more, though, especially if you've been playing the path settings; you can always run the installer in /config to get a fresh copy of LocalSettings.php if you find that everything's broken.)
*Run update.php *Check the extensions you need out from SVN, using the same release branch you downloaded MediaWiki from (you could also just copy over your old extensions directory, but then you won't know whether they're up-to-date) * http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Short_URL#Recommended_how-to_guide_.28s...:)