Improving dependency management and easing upgrades

Markus Glaser Release Manager

Current Situation

• Upgrading MediaWiki is easy, upgrading extensions is not

• Hard to find working extension versions for older MW releases

• Becomes even more apparent with LTS version

By psyberartist [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Actors

• Extension developers

– Develop against MW versions

– Know dependencies

• Release Management

– Provide infrastructure

– Provide best practices

• Users

– Provide feedback

By Ben Hartshorne [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Versioning extensions

• Compatibility layer • Versioning

– per MediaWiki version – per extension version

• Automated tagging and branching – Extension state? – Backports – Currently per MediaWiki version

• Custom tagging and branching – Extension versions

Managing dependencies

• Declare matching versions

– Require minimum version

– How do we define a maximum version?

– How about several dependencies, e.g. MW and Stub or ULS?

• Use Composer

– There’s already a MediaWiki package

– And SMW!

By David Monniaux [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Crowd certification

• Idea

– on mediawiki.org, everyone can indicate working combinations

• Different paradigm

– show what works instead of excluding things that don't work

• Drawback

– often not enough data

Usage statistics

• Idea

– MW registers with WikiApiary upon installation (opt-in)

– WikiApiary polls MW for extension usage

• RFC: Opt-in registration – http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/ Opt-

in_site_registration_during_installation

BTW

• MediaWiki 1.22 RC0 is out

– SimpleAntiSpam bundled

– Mark as patrolled link on every page and revision

– Vector extension merged

– Ancient skins removed

http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.22/mediawiki-1.22.0rc0.tar.gz

Thanks!

Do you have questions, thoughts or any other input?