Mediawiki versions in OpenSuSE

edroyston · January 19, 2010, 11:47am

All,

I have been a big fan of Mediawiki for some time now and have had it installed on a couple of servers that are all running OpenSuSE (just upgraded one to 11.2!).

It seems that since about OpenSuSE 10 that Mediawiki has been removed out of the main repos for the distribution. I can understand this in that perhaps not everyone wants to use it and there is limited space on the DVDs, etc. However, I have also been tracking as to where it has ended up in the repositories.

At the moment there are three places I can find it in the OpenSuSE 11.2 build repos -

home:/jvrdld:/packages/openSUSE_11.2
home:/Michael_Knight/openSUSE_11.2
home:/etrash:/webapps/openSUSE_11.2

From the above it seems that two of these are “user” build areas and the other one, etrash, (looks more populated) seems to be the current resting place. The version of Mediawiki in etrash looks like it is still the same version that is from OpenSuSE 11.1 (bar a minor, minor version update). Is this the version that most people are using for their own deployments of Mediawiki? Seems a little strange since the version on Mediawiki’s website is 1.15, the repo is only 1.13 and usually between OpenSuSE releases the version level jumps by at least one major revision. Then again, two thumbs up to the maintainer of the package in the first place!

I know from other forum postings that SuSE has a plan on upgrading the existing OpenSuSE wiki to a new version of Mediawiki. Would this new version be the one that is currently in the build repos or is it going to be a newer version? If it is a newer version could the newer version be put into the build repos?

Ed

ken_yap · January 19, 2010, 12:11pm

FWIW, it’s very easy to install mediawiki from source. Since mediawiki releases a new version every quarter this would be the easiest way to keep up, because you should go through the upgrade procedures that mediawiki recommends, and that upgrade procedure is not something that’s easy to express in an RPM package.

djh-novell · September 26, 2010, 5:18pm

Can somebody point me to a description of the simplest way to upgrade a mediawiki installation when opensuse is upgraded?

I was running mediawiki successfully and happily on a box running opensuse10.2. I upgraded the box to opensuse 11.2 and discovered mediawiki was no longer in the standard repositories. I found version 1.13.3 in the home:Michael_Knight repository and installed that. I’ve found a 339-line document in /srv/www/htdocs/mediawiki/UPGRADE and am wondering if there is some simpler description of what is necessary to get the wiki to run again.

edroyston · September 27, 2010, 12:52am

Notice that you resurrected an old post of mine - don’t mind it but not sure as to the policy on bumping old threads. However, the quick answer to your question is that I have followed what ken_yap has suggested and gone directly to the source for Mediawiki. Grab a hold of the tarball off of their website and use it. This does sort-of go against what I normally prefer on just about every box I sysadmin (and there are a LOT of them - though admittedly only a couple of Mediawiki boxes and so I can grudgingly accept this method) and that is that I do really prefer RPMs. That way I can easily find out the version of software that is installed on a particular machine. Oh well…

Anyways, a more detailed answer your question (but not super-detailed) that I usually do after performing an OS upgrade (usually through zypper dup) on the Mediawiki boxes that I have (adjust the following for your setup, etc., etc.):

Before you do ANY of this make sure that both Apache and MySQL are shutdown. You do NOT want to do any of this with them up as you may end with a corrupted database, etc. Usual caveats apply - if you wipe out your system then don’t blame me, etc.
Mediawiki usually resides in something like /srv/www/htdocs/mediawiki (say under a plain vanilla OpenSuSE installation - doesn’t really matter which version). As you probably know, this is where the web server usually publishes its stuff from (unless you have mucked around with DocRoot under the Apache configuration (or chose your web server)). Copy this directory off somewhere so that you have a backup of what was there.
Goto the mysql folder (usually /var/lib/mysql). Copy this folder completely as well (usually I just copy it to mysql.old). Make sure that you have enough disk space for this since if you are running other MySQL databases within the instance that you have then you could have a lot of data there. This is “crude but effective” and I find this solution easier than jumping on as an admin and performing a mysql dump, etc., etc. Also, you will have an exact copy that you can go back to if all goes haywire with your new setup.
Grab a hold of the mediawiki tarball from the Mediawiki website. They are up to 1.16.0 at the time of this posting. Extract the Mediawiki tarball in the /srv/www/htdocs/mediawiki directory. Check to make sure that your AdminSettings.php is up-to-date (this should have.
Startup your MySQL database and make sure that it is running properly.
Goto the maintenance directory within /srv/www/htdocs/mediawiki and run php update.php. This will go through and update any settings within your existing setup to the newer version of MediaWiki. It will also make the appropriate changes to the MySQL database to take into account new MediaWiki features.
If you have any extensions then check with Mediawiki’s website to see whether there are new versions available. Grab a hold of them and put them in the extensions directory (under /srv/www/htdocs/mediwiki). One of the ones that I like is the ability to generate PDF files from Wiki pages.
Lastly, fire up Apache and login to a bunch of your pages to make sure that things are working properly again. Grab a hold of a “tame user” and get them to do the same (you might be surprised at what kind of things they will pick up - ran into a Swedish language bug once to do with, I think, some sort of maths equations display - not that I am handling anything in Swedish but it seemed to kick in with an international language change that the MediaWiki guys did - had to do some MySQL changes to get things fixed).

All of this is covered in the Mediawiki documentation on their website. I would suggest going and having a read through their procedures as to what to expect, etc. Another thing I should add is that occasionally I have cleared out my MediaWiki setup and rather than extracting over the top of what is there, just simply copied in the directories/files from the old setup into the right locations under the new setup. I hate having to sort out issues with old/new setup being mixed together (reminds me of Windows OS “upgrades” - avoid this sort of thing like the plague - it is a LOT cleaner to install things anew and copy old data into place sometimes).

I should add to all of this is that there have been several packages that I have found useful over the years as part of my “standard builds” that have regrettably been removed from the main distribution. One of these is FreeNX - the free NoMachine server available under Linux. If you haven’t mucked around with it then I would highly recommend giving it a do as it is a lot faster/more secure than out-of-the-box VNC. Then again this is a digression from the topic at hand.

I think that there is another posting on the forums discussing the MediaWiki skin that is used for the OpenSuSE website. I was after something that was nice and clean once but have now just resorted to using the defaults. Might investigate this further if I have the time.

Integrating with Drupal or some sort of CMS is another thing of interest that I think can be done but then probably best off in another posting… :\

djh-novell · September 28, 2010, 12:33am

Hi, Many thanks for the detailed reply. I’ve got it working now. I think I was overpowered by all the instructions as to how to upgrade from different ancient versions, but by ignoring that and concentrating on the steps you describe it all worked.

I think mysql can default to some Swedishness of character handling. A colleague has a database that has an ungodly mix of Swedish and ‘general’ collatiion orders and it doubles the size of all my SELECT statements to bring them back to sanity.

Cheers, Dave

djh-novell · September 29, 2010, 4:33pm

I spoke too early. Just in case anybody else reads this thread, the version I used does not work. It’s OK to view pages but as soon as you try to log in you get PHP errors. It seems to be a bug fixed in a later Mediawiki version.

I don’t really want a wiki that I have to maintain separately from the rest of my system, so it looks like I’m now looking for some new wiki software. Unfortunately, it seems that opensuse doesn’t include any at all nowadays.

adsum01nl · September 29, 2010, 10:29pm

Hi,

Try Moin Moin, its a nice wiki! I am not sure how hard-core of an installation you are going for but for the desktop version its easy enough to install. But I agree with you Open Suse would do well to give more attention to Wiki and RSS. It would be great to have a KDE version…or even better yet Konqueror integrated!

djh-novell · September 29, 2010, 10:55pm

Yes, moin-moin is one that I’m considering. But it isn’t packaged for opensuse AFAIK. No wikis are! Ubuntu has it but it’s quite a big step to move my main desktop from suse to ubuntu.

martin_helm · September 29, 2010, 11:45pm

djh-novell wrote:

>
> Yes, moin-moin is one that I’m considering. But it isn’t packaged for
> opensuse AFAIK. No wikis are! Ubuntu has it but it’s quite a big step to
> move my main desktop from suse to ubuntu.
>
>
Reagrding mediawiki I do not really see the benefit in packaging such web
based systems, the installations are fairly trivial and follow the pattern:

download the archive from the original page (e. g. mediawiki)
install a lamp on opensuse (this are two or three mouse clicks with yast)
unpack the downloaded archive into a (sub) folder where apache looks for web
pages (by default /srv/www/htdocs), make a subfolder mediawiki for example
and put it there.
Go into a browser and use the link to the config page.
This pattern works for most of these simple web applications including sugar
crm, wikis and …

A more detailed description is here
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Installation

Took me less than 15 minutes to make it run.
One reason not to rpm such applications is how do you decide about when you
need several different instances of them, that would not be possible with an
rpm.

djh-novell · September 30, 2010, 12:49am

Well the point of packaging any application is surely the maintenance rather than the original installation. Both updates to the package itself and updates to the underlying system. Having everybody discover independently exactly which combinations of which programs work together (or more importantly, don’t work together) is inefficient. Why package desktops, or LAMP components?

And even if installations/maintenance are simple, they’re all different. Yet more cruft to remember. I’d like to be able to concentrate on the things I’m trying to do rather than having to sharpen and polish my tools all the time.

martin_helm · September 30, 2010, 2:17am

djh-novell wrote:

>
> Well the point of packaging any application is surely the maintenance
> rather than the original installation. Both updates to the package
> itself and updates to the underlying system. Having everybody discover
> independently exactly which combinations of which programs work together
> (or more importantly, don’t work together) is inefficient. Why package
> desktops, or LAMP components?
>
> And even if installations/maintenance are simple, they’re all
> different. Yet more cruft to remember. I’d like to be able to
> concentrate on the things I’m trying to do rather than having to sharpen
> and polish my tools all the time.
>
What I wanted to point to is that web apps are severly different to other
applications. The complete lamp stack is mad of “classic” applications like
apache, mysql and so on and there is a certain (big) benefit in having these
packaged with all the dependencies in place.
But for example mediawiki and similar systems packaged in an rpm would lead
to an installation where you have exactly one mediawiki in this example at
exactly one predefined place in your webserver. I lack to see how this makes
sense in general.
But your mileage may vary.
I guess it is trivial to create rpm’s in the build service for most common
web applications it needs only someone who is interested to do it.

ken_yap · September 30, 2010, 3:38am

Webapps (and web browsers) run on a faster development cycle than normal OS utilities, and take a lot of effort for a package maintainer to track. Even in other distros you will find that the distro packages are one or three versions behind the latest webapp release.

IMHO it’s not that hard to update a webapp using the sources. Mediawiki releases a new version every quarter. Security fixes just need the source patches, and some webapps, e.g. Moodle, allow you to update via CVS, so you just need to issue one CVS update command for that and then to go to the webapp’s admin page to finish the upgrade.

djh-novell · October 1, 2010, 3:02pm

I understand what you and Martin are saying but I don’t care about having the latest release. It’s just a tool, and I want to keep it in the same box as all my other tools. I guess we’ll just have to accept that people have different viewpoints.

For me, what it means is that I’ve now moved my wiki from my opensuse desktop m/c to an ubuntu LTS machine. mediawiki is in the mainstream repositories there, as is moin-moin and dokuwiki. The likelihood is increasing that I’ll migrate everything so as to avoid having to run two different sysadmin technologies.

martin_helm · October 2, 2010, 11:09am

djh-novell wrote:
>
> For me, what it means is that I’ve now moved my wiki from my opensuse
> desktop m/c to an ubuntu LTS machine. mediawiki is in the mainstream
> repositories there, as is moin-moin and dokuwiki. The likelihood is
> increasing that I’ll migrate everything so as to avoid having to run two
> different sysadmin technologies.
>
I wrote “it only needs a volunteer” for packaging but did not lookup that
there already is one. If you look at the build service (and do a search
which includes the home projects) you will find rpm’s for mediawiki with 1-
click install (checked that for 11.3)

http://software.opensuse.org/search?q=mediawiki&baseproject=openSUSE%3A11.3&lang=de&exclude_debug=true

djh-novell · October 3, 2010, 7:48pm

yes but if you read the thread you’d see that that was where I started. The m/c is on 11.2 and a volunteer has put a version into the OBS that doesn’t work.

The point is that the distro doesn’t support even one wiki. Other distros do. So that’s the way I’m moving.

I’ve also just wasted several hours trying to deal with the chaos that is multimedia on suse these days and this machine is still booting off of a DVD because grub doesn’t work.