Jan, and many others, have made a lot of valid comments on this
discussion. So why have they all been summarily dismissed with such... complete lack of consideration?
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.
To that end, what can we do about it? Might I suggest we put together an IdeaLab proposal https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab and see if we can pool our own resources (attention and time) to figuring out what it would take to improve this part of MediaWiki? See if there's enough interest, identify opportunities for support (dev skills and money) and take care of this.
I also suggest we make an appropriate and courteous amount of productive noise in Phabricator https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/mediawiki-installer/. Add experiences, feedback, and information to existing tasks related to the installer. Add new ones for issues that have yet to be discovered.
Yours, Chris Koerner clkoerner.com
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!
Gordo
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
On 16/12/15 17:14, Bryan Davis wrote:
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.
"MediaWiki FLOSS project community"? Is that the contributors to the code? And those who produce other artefacts (not code)?
In my mind I guess that Drupal (installer and maintainer) and "drush" to assist that (if you choose) is an example of what would be attractive. Packages such as CiviCRM are included in the Drupal control panel.
On a much smaller scale, Webtrees has a one click upgrade facility. Webtrees is also PHP/MYSQL.
This failed for me for a long, but I think now works with my configuration most of the this.
Requirements: a simple installer and a one click maintainer for all!
:-)
Gordo
P.S. 1.26.1 announced.
On 17/12/15 10:31, Gordon Joly wrote:
Requirements: a simple installer and a one click maintainer for all!
There is some talk over on Wikitech related to this.
Subject: Announcing mediawiki-containers, a Docker-based MediaWiki installer
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2015-December/084394.html
Gordo
mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org