On Mon, Jul 4, 2022 at 12:45 PM Jeffrey T. Darlington jeff.darlington@gmail.com wrote:
... Most often when I get bit by a MediaWiki issue, it's situations like this, where some ancient setting installed 14 years ago falls out of scope. It's not exactly reasonable to ask users to go digging through 21 major(?) versions of release notes to figure out that something changed 11 years ago and the current version breaks it. Then again, I don't have any good suggestions on how to improve that situation either. I maintain sites and APIs that others call, and deprecating old code is both necessary and trouble-inducing. Just... venting some frustration here.
It would be helpful if Mediawiki put a new LocalSettings.php in the tarball so we can see what a modern one looks like.
Our upgrade process [1] makes provisions for a Mediawiki-distributed LocalSettings.php, but one is never provided. Our process says to copy Mediawiki's tarball LocalSettings.php to LocalSettings.php.orig to preserve a pristine one for reference. But when things go sideways we never have a reference to check.
Reusing an existing LocalSettings.php is part of Mediawiki's published upgrade process. [2] "Adapt your LocalSettings.php" is not really helpful. [3] For example, it did not tell us to remove a call to DefaultSettings.php from our LocalSettings.php.
[1] https://github.com/weidai11/website/blob/master/mediawiki/wiki-upgrade.txt [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Upgrading#Other_files [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Upgrading#Adapt_your_LocalSettings.php
Jeff