Hoi, Pointing out that the maintainer of an extension is responsible for a proper functioning of an extensions tells me who to blame. For a tool intended to upgrade a MediaWiki environment this is hardly relevant particularly for the extensions that the WMF does not run itself there is no way of knowing if an upgrade will work well.
From a development point of view, it may be a particular developer who "is
to blame" but in reality it is the person maintaining a Wiki who is responsible, has to cope with the fall out and will be blamed.
When a tool is provided that helps with the upkeep of MediaWiki installations, it is irresponsible to consider this. There scenario that may work is to define "profiles" of MediaWiki software specific to a particular role. Such a profile is tested before it is enabled for upgrade.
Profiles that come to mind: Semantic MediaWiki, Wikipedia, WikiEducator ... Thanks, GerardM
On 2 August 2010 15:20, Roan Kattouw roan.kattouw@gmail.com wrote:
2010/8/2 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:
Hoi, The big problem with upgrading MediaWiki is the upgrading of extensions.
It
is not documented anywhere if extensions will work with a specific
release
of MediaWiki. Being able to install extensions is a great thing when you know upfront that the extensions you are interested in will actually work and not crash your installation.
We branch and tag extensions along with versions of MediaWiki, so the code found at http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/tags/REL1_15_5/extensions/ is supposed to work with MW 1.15.5. However, this assumes that the trunk version of each extension worked with the trunk version of MW at the time of the branch point, which is not always the case and is the responsibility of the extension maintainer. Versioned releases can also be downloaded through ExtensionDistributor at mediawiki.org, although ED breaks all the time and we've been getting lots of questions in #mediawiki from people whose wiki broke because they installed the trunk version of ParserFunctions (downloaded through ED) with MediaWiki 1.15.
Roan Kattouwv (Catrope)
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