[Pkg-mediawiki-devel] Bug#414196: mediawiki1.7: misleading error message from config page

[Eric Hansander]

Package: mediawiki1.7
Version: 1.7.1-4
Severity: normal

When trying to configure MediaWiki on my system via the web interface,
I encountered the error "Attempting to connect to database server as
root... failed due to authentication errors. Check passwords." After
some investigation I found that it was in fact not caused by
authentication errors (at least as far as I can tell), but it was
failing to connect to the database because PHP5 was configured with
sql.safe_mode turned on (configuration worked fine after turning this
off).

It seems like other errors than failure to authenticate due to
erroneous login information can cause this message to be displayed
(eg. a misconfigured PHP).

I'm not a PHP programmer at all, but having browsed through the code
for the configuration page, I believe the problem is that $errno
values 1045 and 2000 are treated the same near line 686 in the file
config/index.php. If I have read the online manuals correctly, error
number 1045 indicates that access was denied, while number 2000 means
"unknown error". Perhaps these two should generate different error
messages, to make troubleshooting easier?

I also had a look at the 1.9.3 version of the code, and the situation
seems to be the same there, although I have not had time to verify
that.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0
   APT prefers testing
   APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.17
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=sv_SE (charmap=ISO-8859-1)

Versions of packages mediawiki1.7 depends on:
ii  apache2                       2.2.3-3.2  Next generation, scalable, extenda
ii  apache2-mpm-prefork [httpd]   2.2.3-3.2  Traditional model for Apache HTTPD
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0]         1.5.11     Debian configuration management sy
ii  mime-support                  3.39-1     MIME files 'mime.types' & 'mailcap
ii  php5                          5.2.0-8    server-side, HTML-embedded scripti
ii  php5-cli                      5.2.0-8    command-line interpreter for the p
ii  php5-mysql                    5.2.0-8    MySQL module for php5

Versions of packages mediawiki1.7 recommends:
ii  mysql-server                  5.0.30-3   mysql database server (meta packag
ii  mysql-server-5.0 [mysql-serve 5.0.30-3   mysql database server binaries

-- debconf information:
* mediawiki/webserver: apache2
   mediawiki/upgrade-1d5: true
   mediawiki/upgrade-1d5-adminuser: root