Non-responsive Maintainer: mediawiki

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 15 February 2013 12:24, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 15/02/13 05:44 AM, Tom Hughes wrote:
>>
>> On 15/02/13 03:02, Adam Williamson wrote:
>>
>>> On 08/02/13 01:36 PM, Pete Travis wrote:
>>>
>>>> I haven't poked at mediawiki in a while, so please correct me if I'm
>>>> wrong, but isn't it fairly self contained? I recall copying the content
>>>> from /usr/share/ to /var/www/ then localizing. Having a new version
>>>> shouldn't break existing deployments unless they are served out of
>>>> /usr/share/, and that doesn't seem sane. The update would then be
>>>> available, not imposed.
>>>
>>>
>>> I may be misunderstanding you, but I _think_ you've got the wrong end of
>>> the stick here. Fedora webapps are indeed packaged to be served out of
>>> /usr/share/whatever . They ship with /etc/httpd/conf.d config files
>>> which point to the /usr/share location where they are installed. This is
>>> all by policy and How It's Supposed To Be. Only files that absolutely
>>> need to be actually inside /var/www for some reason or another are
>>> supposed to be packaged there. In general, the idea is that webapp files
>>> are just static data files like any others and belong in /usr/share .
>>> See
>>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#Web_Applications .
>>
>>
>> You're both kind of right - the README.RPM file that comes in the
>> mediawiki package tells you to run "mw-createinstance <path>" to create
>> an instance and that sets up a document root in the specified path by
>> both copying some files, like LocalSettings.php, and symlinking others
>> to the /usr/share code.
>
>
> Huh. That sounds...interesting. I haven't run mediawiki itself, so I wasn't
> aware of that, I was just referring to my general knowledge of how webapps
> are packaged in Fedora (e.g. wordpress, which I do run). Thanks.


So one of the issues that Axel's mediawiki package is trying to solve
is the "1 server, many mediawikis" problem. Many servers will run
multiple mediawikis at the same time with each one having a different
customer. This requires doing copies to different trees and such. Of
course it makes it a pain in ass when upgrading because you end up
with stuff in your tree which may not match what /usr/share/mediawiki/
provides etc etc.

The preferred upstream solution was at one point to just stick it in
/var/www and skip links etc.


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
"Don't derail a useful feature for the 99% because you're not in it."
Linus Torvalds
"Years ago my mother used to say to me,... Elwood, you must be oh
so smart or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I
recommend pleasant. You may quote me."  —James Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd