It's been a relatively productive year for the packaging of Kiwix, an offline Wikipedia reader, in Debian. My minimum expectations for the Buster release scheduled in mid-2019 are that all necessary C/C++ libraries to build the latest versions of Kiwix are in Debian. libzim is at v4.0.4, and basically ready…
Tim is working on a new profiler for PHP, since there are issues with xhprof/tideways that really aren't worth dealing with...and that we can do better in profiling. He's written up some details on https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T205059, and there's some initial code in our Gerrit.I've done the initial Debian packaging at https://salsa.debian.org/mediawiki-team/php-excimer…
I posted most of my poolcounter #Debian packaging work: https://salsa.debian.org/mediawiki-team/poolcounterThere's one remaining issue with the makefile trying to build poolcounterd twice that should get fixed upstream: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/services/poolcounter/+/463700
Following the MediaWiki 1.31.1 security release, I was finally able to update the Debian package to 1.31 LTS in preparation for the Debian Buster release.
The #MediaWiki security update has been pushed to #Debian stable after a few hiccups (thanks Moritz!): https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2018/msg00232.htmlI also pushed an update for Xenial users to my PPA: https://launchpad.net/~legoktm/+archive/ubuntu/mediawiki-ltsThose packages are for 1.27, which is the older LTS version. 1.31 hit unstable today, so I'll be providing backports for it shortly!…
What's the value in using Linux packages for your software vs installing from git? https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2018/06/msg00097.html explained it really well. The explanation I tell people for MediaWiki is that if you want a wiki that just works and would like to forget about administering it - use the Debian package. If…
I've created a new tool to make it easier for humans to browse Wikimedia's APT repository: apt.wikimedia.org. Wikimedia's servers run Debian (Ubuntu is nearly phased out), and for the most part use the standard packages that Debian provides. But in some cases we use software that isn't in the official…
#MediaWiki 1.30.0 is now in #Debian unstableThis is a short term transition to help test something that is close to the next LTS version: 1.31 (out in June!).https://tracker.debian.org/news/949012/accepted-mediawiki-11300-1-source-into-unstable/
The MediaWiki packaging team for Debian (just me really) is now fully off of the deprecated alioth.debian.org! https://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-mediawiki-devel/2018-January/003271.html
Full quality video available on Wikimedia Commons, as well as the slides. I had a blast attending DebConf '17 in Montreal, and presented about my efforts to bring back MediaWiki into Debian. The talks I went to were all fantastic, and got to meet some amazing people. But the best…
I've submitted a talk to Wikimania titled apt install mediawiki. It's about getting the MediaWiki package back into Debian, and efforts to improve the overall process. If you're interested, sign up on the submissions page :)
Barring any bugs, the last set of changes to the MediaWiki Debian package for the stretch release landed earlier this month. There are some documentation changes, and updates for changes to other, related packages. One of the other changes is the addition of a "powered by Debian" footer icon (drawn…
Today texvc was re-accepted for inclusion into Debian. texvc is a TeX validator and converter than can be used with the Math extension to generate PNGs of math equations. It had been removed from Jessie when MediaWiki itself was removed. However, a texvc package is still useful for those who…
In MediaWiki 1.28, MaxSem improved diff limits in the pure PHP diff implementation that ships with MediaWiki core. However Wikimedia and other larger wikis use a PHP extension called wikidiff2, for better performance and additional support for Japanese, Chinese, and Thai. wikidiff2 1.4.1 is now available in Debian unstable and…
MediaWiki 1.27 LTS is now in Debian unstable! https://tracker.debian.org/news/783855
