"Brion Vibber" brion@wikimedia.org wrote in message news:4A92DDBB.50300@wikimedia.org...>
Some folks also have no command-line shell access to their server, in which case they can't run any of the maintenance scripts -- so have no place to set an environment variable there either.
I have this problem on several of my hosts; I'd actually say it's "most" or at least "many" that have to hack around with the installer to do updates (or run schema changes using phpMyAdmin, which is a Bad Thing). A web-based interface for running maintenance scripts is an essential step, but that's hampered by the fact that currently scripts actually *check* and die if they appear on the web interface (presumably for security). Things like extensions/Maintenance are hackish ways to circumvent that by copy- and-pasting the code from each script you want to run; I have run scripts in the past in that way, but it's really nasty.
We do need a web-based maintenance interface and especially a web- based updater; IIRC there is already some work on this? Would having a single access point to MediaWiki aid this? I expect it would.
--HM