[Pkg-mediawiki-devel] Packaging mediawiki extentions

Sandro Tosi matrixhasu at gmail.com
Sat Jun 10 23:09:10 UTC 2006


Hi all,
I've stated using mediawiki at work and we applied some extentions.
I'd like to package them so that debian installation for extantions is
as easy as apt-get them.

I've wondered about it some, and this is what comes out.

Basically, the work to do is:

- copy some php (or others) files/directory in
/usr/share/mediawiki*/extentions (sometimes in includes)
- modify /etc/mediawiki*/LocalSettings.php adding
``require_once('extentions/<ext_name.php>');´´ at the bottom of that
file, just before ``?>´´ closing tag (easily to do replacing ``?>´´
with `require_once('extentions/<ext_name.php>');´´ \n ``?>´´)

Something to think about:

> extentions are php files, there are some problems with them? For sure they have to be released as GPL (or other licences that allow us to include them in debian); other that, do you see something else?

> An important thing to note it is that /etc/mediawiki*/LocalSettings.php must exists because an extentions could be installed: where is the best place to check that file existance? preinst?

> if an extention could run on mw 1.4 and 1.5 it has to be packaged twice, since paths are different: could we solve somehow? or don't bother since mw1.4 is obsolete? could it be same issue with mw1.6,using different directories?

A great problem is:

# no .tar.gz upstream package. Usually they are php (or other format,
i.e. pdf...) downloadable from internet. We could create a
debian-specific package, but it makes little sense to me... (and there
is even some problem with package version)

That's all, folks :) But I'd like to hear some comments from you about it.

In next days, I'll try to create a package for some easy exts, just for test.

Cheers,
Sandro

-- 
Sandro Tosi (aka Morpheus, matrixhasu)
My (little) site: http://matrixhasu.altervista.org/



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