Nick Jenkins wrote:
This would triple the disk space requirements for the data dumps (quadruple after the next major upgrade, quintuple the time after that...)
Surely it should only double the disk space requirements? XML format dumps I would say are the same size, or possibly even slightly larger, than SQL dumps.
Don't forget that 1.4 and 1.5 have completely different page database layouts; 1 + 2 = 3.
Besides, most people I think probably don't want every revision ever. Nor do they probably want talk pages. In other words, one extra file, namely the SQL version of pages_public.xml.gz, whose size is going to almost the same. For EN, the largest of all, that's only ~ 900 megs. For 900 meg it stops people whining.
If you can narrow down the request a bit that makes it more likely we'll slip something into the backup script. :)
Is that actually what people want? In which version? What about everyone who wants something slightly different?
And what's the point of every user who wants an SQL dump downloading the XML version, downloading mwdumper, downloading mono, setting up mono, running mwdumper, and creating the dump?
Why do that when MediaWiki comes with an import tool built-in? ;)
Which version of MySQL do you want that dump for? (Or did you want it for PostgreSQL? Or Oracle?)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)