Rene Pijlman wrote:

I've installed Mediawiki 1.3.0beta5 on a Linux Debian Woody (3.0, stable) machine.

Now when I try to use Special:Askasql as sysop I get the error message:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: mysql_thread_id() in /home/rene/projects/carriere/www/wiki/includes/Database.php on line 461

This must be because woody has PHP 4.1, and mysql_thread_id() was introduced in PHP 4.3.

That bit is not strictly necessary; wrap it in a version check:

(in Database.php) function startTimer( $timeout ) { global $IP; if( version_compare( phpversion(), "4.3.0", "gte" ) { # This will kill the query if it's still running after $timeout seconds. $tid = mysql_thread_id( $this->mConn ); exec( "php $IP/killthread.php $timeout $tid &>/dev/null &" ); } }

If you have a runaway query you'll have to wait for it to finish or kill it manually.

Please let us know if anything else is broken on 4.1.2; that's our minimum supported version and only because Debian takes twenty years to put out a stable release. ;) However it's not really tested very often.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Quoting Rene Pijlman, from the post of Fri, 06 Aug:

Unfortunately, there is no backport of PHP 4.3.x for woody on www.backports.org.

I use this: http://dotdeb.org

I find their response time to erratas is also very quick. I run MW 1/3beta3 on it with no ill effects.

What's the best way to proceed? Install PHP 4.3 from source on woody? Or upgrade the machine to Debian sarge?

Do NOT upgrade a production server to testing! It has no security updates! I had a major break-in when I upgraded to woody when it was still in testing. a silly and easy crack that was fixed in stable a week before this happend.