On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 9:03 PM, Rob Lanphier <robla(a)robla.net> wrote:
+1 for package maintainer education (as frustrating
and unproductive
as it might be thusfar)
I think "education" isn't a good term for what needs to happen here.
More like "doing the work for them". Package maintainers might
maintain lots of packages, and certainly don't know much about any of
them. Some MW developer needs to look at the popular distros, read up
on their packaging standards, and make a MediaWiki package that a)
meets the standards, but also b) actually works and is supported
upstream. Keep any packaging tools in our own SVN where that makes
sense, so the distributor can ship software with absolutely no changes
if they like. And give them some contacts they can forward any
patches to, so that hopefully that don't feel the need to accept
patches that haven't been reviewed upstream.
As I remarked on IRC, having packages as an official installation
mechanism has nice benefits for people who don't get their code from
distros, too. We could set up our own official repository. This
would handle updates automatically, but it would do more than that
too. Our current installer is crippled in all sorts of ways because
it has to run as the web user. An installer that runs as root could
do all sorts of handy things, particularly where permissions are an
issue:
* Enable uploads by default
* Hide deleted images properly
* Enable $wgCacheDirectory by default
* Enable math by default
* Enable clamav by default (maybe :) )
* Enable Djvu and SVG support by default
* Enable ImageMagick by default
* Set up cron job to run jobs by default instead of hacky running on page view
We'd likely want to provide packages for all the extensions in SVN
too, somehow. This is complicated by the fact that almost none of the
extensions are actually released independently. Maybe that should
change somehow.
On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 8:48 AM, Lane, Ryan
<Ryan.Lane(a)ocean.navo.navy.mil> wrote:
It's "special". It isn't necessarily
the fault of the distro or the package
maintainer for the quality of the packages. It is our fault. Upgrading is
unreliable for a number of reasons. It is definitely unreliable enough that
I wouldn't trust a package to do it for me, and I can't reasonably recommend
it for anyone else either.
Upgrading is perfectly reliable in my experience, as long as all your
extensions are reliable, and you upgrade them too. If people do file
edits, or they install weird extensions, then of course upgrades might
break stuff. But if you're using only well-supported extensions,
there should be no major problems in most cases. If there are, well,
that's what distributions have testing for!