>>>> "SS" == Steve Sanbeg
<ssanbeg(a)ask.com> writes:
SS> maintenance/nukeNS.php was written for pretty much that purpose; to purge
SS> all the obsolete stuff from that namespace without flooding delete logs,
SS> etc.
Alas, looking in
* Remove pages with only 1 revision from the MediaWiki namespace, without
* flooding recent changes, delete logs, etc.
* Irreversible (can't use standard undelete) and does not update link tables
*
* This is mainly useful to run before maintenance/update.php when upgrading
* to 1.9, to prevent flooding recent changes/deletion logs. It's intended
* to be conservative, so it's possible that a few entries will be left for
* deletion by the upgrade script. It's also possible that it hasn't been
* tested thouroughly enough, and will delete something it shouldn't; so
* back up your DB if there's anything in the MediaWiki that is important to
^namespace
* you.
The problem is nukeNS.php was and is never called by update.php!
Check with ls -ltu (if your access times are tracked in mount(8).)
It is never referred to by any other file but itself:
$ find|LC_ALL=C xargs grep -il nukens
./maintenance/nukeNS.php
Hence its goal of
* run before maintenance/update.php when upgrading to 1.9,
was never achieved!
And, calling it now years later won't help, as update.php invocation
of deleteDefaultMessages.php has already long ago put the messages
etc. in the areas of the database where nukeNS.php doesn't look.
Hence I have proved that wikis that have been around since 1.8 will
have about 1500 rows of useless messages still in the text table, and
corresponding entries in the archive table.
Sure, on Wikipedia that is a speck of sand, but e.g., on a small quiet
wiki the vast majority of the rows in the database will be useless
trash. Repent now!
Another problem for the reader of this thread is "well gosh, has my
wiki been around since 1.8? How can I tell for sure if my memory is
hazy?" Well, maybe somebody can mention how to detect that. Maybe
version increments are logged or should be, for those tracking SVN or
not. Anyways, you can always just look for those useless entries in
your database, that ought to tell you if your wiki has been around
since 1.8.