Domas Mituzas wrote:
Hi Jeff,
Making MediaWiki usable by 3rd parties was Brion's initiative, but it
never produced image of mediawiki that would have same feature set
like the one we run on live site.
Thank you for the thoughtful and informative response.
Of course, extensions used on live site are available
to download,
but I'm not sure everyone can have say.. math support on every
hosting account. Nor mono with our lucene daemon.
Yes, I have all of these and they work.
On the other hand, we always run a version that is not
even released
(right now site runs on 1.8), and there are always features on
Wikimedia servers that do not exist in rolled out packages.
This needs to be reviewed. Running 1.8 on your site is not an issue, but
creating XML dumps
which are incompatible with released versions is. This is what needs to
be addressed.
I don't think php5 is such a menace as you've
portrayed, big shops
(such as Y!) use it, extensions are more developed for php5 than for
php4, it's OO abilities allow more elegant code (and mediawiki is
OO'ish), etc.
php5 packages are available for many Linux distributions (some have
them in 'testing' branches, though) - I've been running php5 RPM on
my Fedora (even FC3) boxes for quite a while.
php 5 crashes and is very unstable for a production server without
patching and
a lot of effort to get it working.
If you think that distributions should have better
support for
MediaWiki, you can ask distributions to do that. They started doing
mediawiki packages themselves anyway ;-)
Our primary mission is to run website, our secondary mission is to
provide software and best practices. And those, surprisingly, include
php5 in the list.
Well, I would assume that the mission should be to make Wikipedia's
content pervasive. One simple
fix to this is to provide XML dumps which work with released MediaWiki
versions. As it stands, from
an external perspective, the current model appears anti-competitive and
monopolistic (though I as said before,
I do not believe this is intentional).
Please consider providing an XML branch which is compatible with
released MediaWiki versions. This is
not something that should be negotiable or optional -- it should be
mandated as a requirement for publishing
dumps .
Jeff
Domas
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