Previous updates: 2018, 2021 Kiwix is an offline content reader, best known for distributing copies of Wikipedia. I have been maintaining it in Debian since 2017. This year most of the work has been keeping all the packages up to date in anticipation of next year's Debian 12 Bookworm release,…
It has been reported that the Russian government has threatened to block access to Wikipedia for documenting narratives that do not agree with the official position of the Russian government. One of the anti-censorship strategies I've been working on is Kiwix, an offline Wikipedia reader (and plenty of other content…
(This is my belated #newindebianbullseye post.) The latest version of the Debian distro, 11.0 aka Bullseye, was released last week and after a long absence, includes Kiwix! Previously in Debian 10/Buster, we only had the underlying C/C++ libraries available. If you're not familiar with it, Kiwix is an offline content…
Last week I officially joined the Site Reliability Engineering team at the Wikimedia Foundation. I'll be working with the Service Operations team, which "...takes care of public and “user-visible” services." I'm glad to be back at the WMF; I had originally started working there in 2013 but recently took a…
Packages for the MediaWiki 1.31 LTS release are now available for the new Ubuntu 20.04 LTS "Focal Fossa" release in my PPA. Please let me know if you run into any errors or issues. In the future these packages will be upgraded to the MediaWiki 1.35 LTS release, whenever that's…
The Symfony project has recently created a set of pure-PHP polyfills for both PHP extensions and newer language features. It allows developers to add requirements upon those functions or language additions without increasing the system requirements upon end users. For the most part, I think this is a good thing,…
