On 7/22/14, 3:09 PM, Mark A. Hershberger wrote:
Max Semenik maxsem.wiki@gmail.com writes:
However all packages I know of (Debian flavors and not) split MW directory and put its parts into different places, trying to follow the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. The result is [...] outright breakages because our code base generally assumes that everything lies in one place.
These are bugs that should be fixed. Release management has worked closely with Debian and Fedora packagers to improve their packaging because, despite any on-wiki disclaimers, people will continue to use "apt-get" and "yum" to install MediaWiki.
Having seen many "institutional" installations of MediaWiki (mostly in universities), imo the distro version is actually the better option to recommend by default for non-sophisticated users. Manually installed MediaWiki, unpacked from tarballs, has a bad habit of being installed once and *never, ever* upgraded. I just found one here running v1.14! If it had been the Ubuntu-package version, it's much more likely someone would have upgraded it in the years since then (e.g. the Apache on this box has been upgraded, but not the MediaWiki). The distro packaging does sometimes introduce some weirdness compared to the official structure, but imo it's the less-bad choice.
-Mark