[Pkg-mediawiki-devel] [Mediawiki-distributors] LWN's discussion on WordPress and distributions

[Jonathan Wiltshire]

Sorry I haven't had chance to join this discussion yet. Real life is 
currently highly demanding :(

On 2012-05-22 18:05, Thorsten Glaser wrote:
> On Tue, 22 May 2012, Mark A. Hershberger wrote:
>
>> On 05/22/2012 12:10 PM, Thorsten Glaser wrote:
>> > Well, we’re 2-3 weeks short of the freeze for the *next* Debian
>> > stable. If you pick a version *now* that’ll have had a stable,
>> > supportable formal release by then, and will put “Long Term 
>> Support”
>> > on it, that’s really all a distributor needs.
>
>> So, 1.19 is out now.  Can we use that one for our first LTS?
>
> Sure. I was asking you to pick, and I’m glad you’re liking the
> idea at all ;_) as maintaining things is work for you.

I would like to 1.19 to be the version we ship in Wheezy. However, with 
the freeze so close we need to consider carefully whether there's enough 
time. Maybe it would be wise to get 1.18 tested and into unstable first 
so we at least have a recent version in, and then see if we get 1.19 in 
its place in time (should be quicker to achieve that second part if the 
first is done)?

Either way it does make me nervous that upstream would move to 
quarterly releases without a long-term branch. We've already seen from 
the 1.15 tree that backporting fixes over that long a time frame gets 
progressively harder. If upstream releases more often they are 
presumably also only going to backport fixes for a shorter time.

If you're prepared to support 1.19 as an LTS then I suggest we try our 
hardest to make that the version we ship in Debian. I didn't get any 
response to my call for testing of 1.18 though, so I guess we could 
shove it into unstable and see who complains (when the math replacement 
is ready).

(For upstream readers: we're talking about a practical period of three 
years Debian security support here, give or take - plus the six months 
or so of frozen time yet to come, during which we're not supposed to put 
anything but targetted fixes in.)

>> > Ah, ok. From what I’ve seen, Jonathan has packaged 1.18 for Debian
>> > experimental, but it lacks mediawiki-math which is provided by 
>> 1.15
>> > and used by our in-house FusionForge deployment
>>
>> The Math extension on English Wikipedia (and others) now has
>> experimental support for MathJax.  But I did look at the Math 
>> extension
>> previously.  I'll poke at it today.

I am working on a new source for mediawiki-math which will take the 
place of the currently bundled extension. That should remove some of the 
barrier to getting 1.18 into unstable. Thorsten, are there any other 
major obstacles for you and Roland with your FF hats on?

I plan to ship mediawiki-math as an empty transitional package, 
mediawiki-extensions-math to replace it (this is consistent with other 
extensions then) and contain the arch:all parts, and 
mediawiki-math-texvc or something with the arch:any parts. Please object 
now if you forsee any problem with that.

> Hrm. Well, the beast as shipped pulled in a whole LaTeχ horde
> and did a lot of magic to support that… we don’t want to lose
> that.



-- 
Jonathan Wiltshire                                      jmw at debian.org
Debian Developer                         http://people.debian.org/~jmw

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