[Mediawiki-l] Using export/import instead of upgrading

[Tim Starling]

Jan Steinman wrote:
> I believe the OP suggested export/import because they had fallen way  
> behind, and lacked confidence in an upgrade process that is generally  
> designed for Wikipedia's needs of strictly sequential incremental  
> upgrades.
> 
> I am in the same situation, running 1.3. Short of upgrading to 1.4,  
> then 1.5, then 1.6... I don't believe this posting really addresses  
> strategies for someone who is way behind to "catch up." The further  
> you are behind, the more likely something will break, no matter how  
> carefully one follows the instructions for upgrading from 1.13.1 to  
> 1.13.2.
> 
> Anyone have any good strategies going from 1.3 to current? I'm  
> planning on making a complete copy, accessed from a new URL, and  
> trying the upgrade on that. But I'm doubtful that such an upgrade will  
> be fruitful.

I put the answer to this question in the upgrade FAQ, and since then I've
answered it about another 5 times on mediawiki-l.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:FAQ#Upgrading

I don't know how many more times I'm going to have to say it.

Upgrades for 1.3 to 1.13 were tested automatically prior to the release of
1.13 using an automated upgrade test:

<http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/release-tools/upgradeTest.py?view=markup>

There are no open bug reports regarding upgrading from 1.3 to 1.13. The
vast majority of reports indicate that it works just fine.

Upgrading may take a long time. Back up your wiki in case the upgrade
script is aborted halfway through and leaves your wiki in an intermediate
state.

The upgrade script is inherently incremental. The updaters.inc file has a
large list of database operations which have been steadily accumulating
since the first MediaWiki release. They are run in the order in which they
were added. Occasionally obsolete or redundant upgrades are removed. So
running each upgrader in turn is effectively equivalent to running the
most recent one.

Some of the old upgraders had bugs. We fixed them in later major releases.
If you run the old upgraders, you risk encountering unfixed bugs in them.

Old upgraders are not supported and we will ignore bug reports against
them. If you encounter a bug when upgrading directly from 1.3 to 1.13, we
will fix it. If you encounter a bug when upgrading from 1.3 to 1.4, we
will ignore you.

-- Tim Starling