* Andrew Dunbar hippytrail@gmail.com [Wed, 17 Nov 2010 13:32:25 +1100]:
Thanks Dmitry. PHP does work. The --help options always work. It turned out the LocalSettings.php somebody on #mediawiki pointed me to require_once()'d several extensions I didn't have and require_once() seems to fail silently. I'll try to aquaint myself better with the Error handling and logging section as you suggest.
require_once() should produce a warning on non-existent files. Warning reports should not be suppressed. For a development there should be
error_reporting = E_ALL | E_STRICT
in php.ini
Is there somewhere an "official" blank or example LocalSettings.php file that would be better to use for people like me to avoid such problems? Rolling my own from scratch doesn't seem ideal either.
Usually it's being produced by web installer. http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/phase3/config/Installer.php?...
New installer is large and I haven't studied it throughly. I am more often upgrading from old versions than install from scratch.
However, when upgrading from old version, you have to add new options manually by observing the HISTORY file. http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/phase3/HISTORY?view=markup
I wish the installer was able to parse original settings and warn of something outdated. However, that might make it really over complicated. Dmitriy