On 3 August 2010 18:14, Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
I'm thankful that the Debian MediaWiki package at least
*works*. Not
that the same can be said of all their packages either (OpenSSL, anyone?). Maybe if we provided .debs and RPMs, people would be less prone to use the distro packages.
That just creates more problems:
- bad quality distro packages
- bad quality our own packages (while we know MediaWiki, we are not
experts in packaging)
- lots of confusion
I've packaged hundreds of RPMs. It isn't difficult, and you don't need to be an expert. It is easy enough to package the MediaWiki software. The real problem comes with upgrades. How does the package handle this? Do we ignore the actual maintanence/update.php portion? Do we run it? How do we handle extensions? Package them too? Do we make a repo for all of this? How are the extensions handled on upgrade?
Having MediaWiki in a package really doesn't make much sense, unless we put a lot of effort into making it work this way.
I don't see any other way out but to reach to the packagers and get their packages fixed. What we can do is to communicate this to our users and try to communicate more with the packagers. We already do the first in our IRC channel (telling users we can't support distro packages, and that they should just download the tarball), but there are lots of place where we don't do that yet.
In short: education and communication, not trying to do their job.
I think we should be doing education, but not for the package maintainers. We should try harder to inform our users that they shouldn't used distro maintained packages, and we should explain why.
Respectfully,
Ryan Lane