[Mediawiki-l] Upgrade to 1.18

[Jeffrey T. Darlington]

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On 11/29/2011 5:08 PM, Olivier Beaton wrote:
> It should be noted that the MediaWiki docs recommend doing the following
> for an upgrade (after your backups):
> 
> tar xvzf mediawiki-1.18.0.tar.gz -C /path/to/your/wiki/ --strip-components=1
> 
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Upgrading#Unpack_the_new_files
> 
> If this is out of date or will cause problems for 1.18, it should
> definitely be changed to reflect that. The users posting about profiler
> errors followed our instructions.

In defense of the existing instructions, there's this:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Upgrading#Can_my_wiki_stay_online_while_it_is_upgrading.3F

"If you are upgrading between major releases of MediaWiki, the preferred
procedure is... Unpack the new version of MediaWiki into a new
directory.  Prepare that new directory: copy your current
LocalSettings.php from the old directory, copy any installed extensions
and custom skins (if any)."

This, however, is buried way down at the bottom and easy to miss.  It
also didn't help things in my case, but that's beside the point.
Perhaps there should be a separate list of instructions for upgrading
between "major" versions and "minor" versions.

It might also be helpful to define "major" and "minor".  When I read
about a "major" release, I think of moving from, say, version 1.x to
2.x; this seems to be the conventional wisdom when it comes to software
versioning.  Moving from 1.17.x to 1.18.x implies a minor release in
many cases.  That varies from project to project, of course, and could
be a source of much political debate, but when you define these terms
differently than common conventions it helps to share that definition
with your users.

- -- 

Jeff Darlington
General Protection Fault
http://www.gpf-comics.com/

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