Wikitech-l November 2003

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

71 participants
128 discussions

en: stats broken (to Brion)
by Erik Zachte 26 Nov '03

26 Nov '03

The stats for en: were not refreshed for a few weeks, now they are, but a new problem appeared. Brion, According to the log file, the script parsed the 'old' database dump file exactly up to the middle, then continued happily to do something else. So the cause must be that splitting and joining the > 2GB dump did not happen transparently and the stitch between first and second half did not match the regexp. Secondly the webalizer stats for wiki comparisons have not been collected since November 12, it seems that the wget procedure is on strike. Cheers, Erik Zachte

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Re: [Mediawiki-l] Gimme something to do
by Brion Vibber 26 Nov '03

26 Nov '03

On Nov 20, 2003, at 17:11, Evan Prodromou wrote: > So, I've been coming up with great ideas for MediaWiki -- or, rather, > great ideas for enhancements for MediaWiki for Wikitravel's needs. But > I figure it's probably going to be easiest to get into the code if I > start working on some bugs instead. > > Are there any bugs that an interested volunteer could start working on > and submitting patches for? The huge list on sourceforge is a bit > much. Some things off the top of my head... Login doesn't actually check that the session cookie is present, so someone coming in with cookies disabled is told their login is successful but it's lost when they visit the next page. We really should check for this condition! It's a fairly frequently reported problem, and probably not that hard to fix. In all probability, simply checking for the existence of the session cookie at the top of SpecialUserlogin.php and complaining if it's not there will be enough. (Bug #770011) The "Cologne Blue" skin has a few minor problems where useful/important links are missing, and various stylistic issues. The structure of the current skin code is kind of difficult to grasp, but the individual bits are fairly not too insane, I think. (Bugs #825774, 827160, etc) See http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cologne_Blue_skin_problems If you want an ugly but simple and important job... we'd like to remove our dependency on register_globals (the option, formerly on by default, in which GET/POST parameters and cookies are dumped into the global variable namespace). Since PHP 4.2 this option is off by default, as it can lead to security problems when there's sloppy coding and you use a variable that turns out to be uninitialized -- until someone slips it into a URL or cookie. Moving from the globals to the $_GET and $_POST arrays would let us remove that configuration dependency and potentially clean up some security trouble if there are any more surprises. (Also related to bug #842921) It's drudge work, but if you pick it up you'll get a quick overview of the whole codebase! :) Another thing that would be nice would be proper locking and/or use of transactional BEGIN/COMMIT wrappers and handling of errors with rollbacks where multiple SQL statements are required to perform a read/write operation. We do have race conditions where simultaneous actions could perhaps interfere with each other, or where an operation that fails partway through leaves the database in an inconsistent state. Again, that's kind of drudge work, sorry. :) See also here: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_tasks -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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Yay for production testing
by Brion Vibber 26 Nov '03

26 Nov '03

Okay, so the dev branch is now running live on the Wikipedia servers. A few more days to clean up remaining obvious bugs, and we'll branch this off as the new stable branch. (Should we give it a version number, or a release codename?) Problems I found and fixed during the rollout: * Language.php hadn't gotten updated to use $wgSitename, which broke some languages and all the non-Wikipedia wikis * Cached pages were being gzipped twice due to a broken merge (I'd moved the call to tryFileCache(), and we ended up with both the old and the new positions calling this function and installing output buffer handlers! I trimmed the extra call and added a double-call check to the function.) * Initial text wasn't being put into the 'reason' field in the confirm deletion screen due to a missing global declaration (also, this check wasn't working for non-article namespaces due to incorrect usage of namespace/title in the queries) * 'Go' search wasn't skipping the MATCH query when $wgDisableTextSearch was set, due to a missing global declaration * Doubled google form, missing the search term in the text box Problems found that still need to be fixed: * Cookie check in Special:Userlogin fails if that's the very first page the visitor came to in the session (possible fix: do a single redirect if the cookie isn't found; on the second try if there's still no cookie we complain) * Editing MediaWiki: messages doesn't clear the entries from memcached. ($wgUseDatabaseMessages is off until this is fixed.) There are probably other problems out there... -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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Talk page notification
by erik_moeller＠gmx.de 26 Nov '03

26 Nov '03

Talk page notification seems to be no longer working, at least on the English Wikipedia. Anyone got any leads what's wrong? Regards, Erik

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Bug hunting: a noble profession
by Poor, Edmund W 26 Nov '03

26 Nov '03

I once spent 5 months testing the same application, and finding bug after bug. The programmers whose code I was testing were not so gracious as E23 or Brion, however. They kept announcing that they had "fixed all the bugs" and seemed to find my reports dismaying. Anyway, I guess my little daughter must have overheard me discussing work, because she started a hobby of finding bugs from the garden outside and bringing them in the house in little jars, to study under her magnifying glass! She wanted to be just like her dad, I guess :-) Ed Poor

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iptables on pliny
by Brion Vibber 26 Nov '03

26 Nov '03

Oh, forgot to mention this yesterday; I got iptables working on pliny finally. Just an added layer of protection. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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Re: [Wikipedia-l] possible link rendering bug?
by Brion Vibber 26 Nov '03

26 Nov '03

Last night I found and fixed a bug in the new persistent link cache code which seriously broke updates to the link tables; when the persistent cache was loaded, the 'old' links variables weren't being set at all, so every link in the page would be added as a duplicate to the database, and newly removed links would not get cleared. On top of this the linkscc entry wasn't cleared due to a missing global declaration. Oh, those annoying little tiny things! Anyway, we've still got a whole bunch of _old_ link table bugs to deal with, as well as having monstrously corrupt tables to start with. E23's working on speeding up the link rebuild script, which is great -- soon we hopefully will be able to clean up the tables without taking the wikis offline for half a day just to do it. We really should scrutinize the persistent linkcache stuff a little more, since synchronization errors between the cache and the regular links tables can cause fun trouble that's hard to track down. (Particularly as the data blob in linkscc is gzipped to minimize io/cache stress; this makes it very hard to inspect it manually.) Anyway, a number of reported link-table bugs have been consolidated into bug #802814: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php? func=detail&aid=802814&group_id=34373&atid=411192 Bad link tables are mostly just a nuisance at present, but they do interfere with a lot of things. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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[jasonr@bomis.com: server: big package... Full of penguins.]
by Jimmy Wales 25 Nov '03

25 Nov '03

Jason won't have a chance to install it until after the holiday (Thursday, Thanksgiving Day in the US), but he's going to play with it, run some benchmarks, make sure it's running right. ----- Forwarded message from Jason Richey <jasonr(a)bomis.com> ----- From: Jason Richey <jasonr(a)bomis.com> Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2003 13:28:21 -0800 To: jwales(a)joey.bomis.com Subject: server: big package... Full of penguins. The server just arrived. -- "Jason C. Richey" <jasonr(a)bomis.com> ----- End forwarded message -----

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Special:Export bug on de:
by Nils Kehrein 25 Nov '03

25 Nov '03

FYI [quote] Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /usr/local/apache/common/php/SpecialExport.php on line 49 [/quote] Regards, Nils. -- Math problems? Call 1-800-[(10x)(13i)^2]-[sin(xy)/2.362x].

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Re: unable to access wikipedia from Netscape 7.01/Win2K pro
by Alexandre NOUVEL 25 Nov '03

25 Nov '03

Hello all, I've sent a message last week-end about further testings I planned to do by the begenning of this week. The tests shows that I can access any wiki site from my workplace. The only problem is that it does not work any more when I try to use Netscape 7.01/windows2000Pro. There is no problem while I use Internet Explorer 5.5 sp2. Is there something wrong with the browser based upon Mozilla when trying to access the wiki? I did not find any pertinent answer to this question while searching the web for such topic. Best regards to all and thanks in advance for your kind help, -- Alexandre.NOUVEL(a)alternatif.net |-> http://www.bigfoot.com/~alexandre.nouvel |-> La copie privée et l'auto-diffusion menacées : http://eucd.info \ I hate spam. I kill spammers. Non mais.

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Wikitech-l November 2003