On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 9:29 AM, Gordon Joly <gordon.joly(a)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
--
Bryan Davis Wikimedia Foundation <bd808(a)wikimedia.org>
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] Sr Software Engineer Boise, ID USA
irc: bd808 v:415.839.6885 x6855