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

[Tim Starling]

Jan Steinman wrote:
>> From: Daniel Friesen <dan_the_man at telus.net>
>>
>> People complain about issues cause they don't follow instructions...
> 
> (Much good advice about how to do incremental upgrades clipped...)
> 
>> Remember Wikipedia? Wikimedia runs off MediaWiki and is being  
>> constantly
>> upgraded. If the upgrade process wasn't handled right then you'd see
>> Wikipedia broken all the time.
> 
> 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.

One more thing: the upgrader is NOT used by Wikimedia and is not designed
for it. We've never run the upgrader on Wikimedia while I've been around.
The upgrader is designed for small wikis and is aimed at a general
non-technical user audience.

To upgrade Wikimedia wikis, we run the SQL patch files directly, or write
special replication-friendly scripts. We aim for at most a few minutes of
read-only time even for a huge wiki like the English Wikipedia, and that
goal sometimes requires quite a bit of planning and effort to achieve.

-- Tim Starling