[Pkg-mediawiki-devel] Bug#706368: [mediawiki] README.Debian broken/outdated

[Filipus Klutiero]

Package: mediawiki
Version: 1:1.19.5-1
Severity: normal

As previously reported, README.Debian is mostly broken or outdated. However, one particularly bad part caused a serious problem on my install when I upgraded mediawiki.

>     Then just copy the generated config to the real system location :
>         mv /var/lib/mediawiki/mw-config/LocalSettings.php \
>          /etc/mediawiki

This is outdated (see https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-core/commit/edd12f0fd60c740673c58919d10cf62e39b74442).
This caused me to proceed with the install this way (391-403 for this step):

>  389  nano /etc/mediawiki/apache.conf
>   390  invoke-rc.d apache2 reload
>   391  mv /var/lib/mediawiki/config/LocalSettings.php  /etc/mediawiki
>   392  #mv /var/lib/mediawiki/mw-config/index.php  /etc/mediawiki
>   393  cd /etc/mediawiki
>   394  ls
>   395  mv /tmp/LocalSettings.php  /etc/mediawiki
>   396  less /var/log/apache2/error.log
>   397  #mv LocalSettings.php /var/lib/mediawiki/
>   398  less /var/log/apache2/error.log
>   399  mv LocalSettings.php /var/lib/mediawiki/
>   400  less /var/log/apache2/error.log
>   401  ls /var/lib/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php
>   402  stat /var/lib/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php
>   403  chown www-data: /var/lib/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php

In other words, when MediaWiki failed to obtain access to LocalSettings.php, I guessed the README was using an old LocalSettings.php location and the new location was now directly the path mentioned in the README without the config/ (/var/lib/mediawiki/). I moved LocalSettings.php there (overwriting the symlink without realizing), and only then fixed the permission problem. At the next upgrade, dpkg quietly turned my LocalSettings.php into a broken symlink, causing both a disruption of service and a limited data loss.

Besides updating the README, there are of course other measures which would avoid this scenario:
* Make the code directly read /etc/mediawiki/ and drop the confusing symlinks, no longer needed
* Just save the generated LocalSettings.php where it has to go directly