[Pkg-mediawiki-devel] Semantic MediaWiki and Composer

[Mark A. Hershberger]

Peter Brooks writes:
> I really like the idea of an easy, unified, installation and updating
> method. I'd particularly like it if it used the apt-get method of
> linux, then you'd not have to have different documentation in
> different places.

Debian developers maintain an LTS package.  They began discussing
packaging 1.23 (the next LTS) for Jessie in September[1].  They don't
have a SMW package, but if there is interest in a
apt-get-able SMW package, that would be the place to start.

There is also a (dead) MediaWiki Extensions team on Launchpad[2] but
that may be another place to try to get SMW packaged for apt-get.

Fedora developers have packaged Semantic Mediawiki for Redhat
derivatives[3], so it can be installed with "yum install
mediawiki-semantic".

> It also didn't seem very unified. If you could take one .json file,
> and use it to describe the entire mediawiki installation, so, to
> upgrade, you'd just need to change the release level, and it'd work
> out all the other dependencies, that would be handy, but it doesn't
> seem to work like that.

We are headed that way, slowly but surely.  Thanks to the SMW devs for
leading the way!

> Couldn't it be integrated with mediawiki completely? If
> LocalSettings.php had a version in it, then it has all the information
> about what is being used - updating from one version to another should
> enable an intelligent script to download the relevant updated &
> compatible versions, give you an option to switch to the new release
> and, if it fails, ideally, an option to switch back - and later, when
> it's stable, clean out the old version.
>
> Would that be impossible?

It isn't impossible and this is the sort of thing that we (the Wiki
Release Team[4]) have as a goal.  In an ideal world, we could just use the
web-based updater that Wordpress has[5].  But this isn't an ideal world
and right now we can only dream about it.

Footnotes: 
[1]  http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-mediawiki-devel/2014-September/003051.html

[2]  https://launchpad.net/~mediawiki-extensions-dev

[3]  http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/mediawiki-semantic.git

[4]  https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WikiReleaseTeam

[5]  http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress#One-click_Update

-- 
Mark A. Hershberger
NicheWork LLC
717-271-1084