[Pkg-mediawiki-devel] packaging of MW extensions

[Thorsten Glaser]

Hi everyone,

I’d like to ask for aid with MediaWiki extensions. We’re
currently using, via FusionForge’s gforge-plugin-mediawiki,
a number of MW farms(plural!), migrating off an older, more
separate, farm of wiki farms.

Now the problem is that we used to have a number of exten-
sions in use, mostly because the old crap was hand-installed
and hand-modified (which leads to funny differences in beha-
viour across instances – one of the reasons I refuse to do
*anything* that cannot be represented via a .deb nowadays),
and not all of them are available already in Debian.

Our systems currently run Lenny with the MW 1.15.3 from bpo
and a very small patch applied (make Special:AllPages not
paged by setting its maximum to 30000 instead of 345, and
allowing webdavs:// and file: URIs) as well as the exten-
sions already provided.

We’ll need at least the following extensions:

• Collection (Wiki → PDF/ODT/…)
  http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Collection

• RSSReader
  http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:RSS_Reader

• Language Selector
  http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LanguageSelector

• Polyglot
  http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Polyglot

• News
  http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:News

• GraphViz
  http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GraphViz

• NoTitle
  http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:NoTitle


Now I’m a DD and relatively versed in packaging myself, but
this is your field of experience, so I’d be glad for any
input on this, such as packaging policies and some sort of
best practices for packaging MW extensions, or whether it’s
possible at all. I’d of course not say no if someone other
than me would do the packaging ☺ although I can certainly
jump in, even on company time. There’s not much personal
interest from me in this though, so please don’t send any
join suggestions my way (unless they relate to the Fusion-
forge related work I do as part of my job… we *are* a
contributor to that project as well).

Thanks in advance,
//mirabilos – tg at d.o
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