Changes

I just upgraded my wiki site, and thought I would write down the steps for further reference. Even though the instructions that come with the source README, UPGRADE and online help are very detailed, I find it helpful to note my personal preferences, observations, and clarifications where I might not understand the instructions.

The process obviously started with downloading the source from the web. However, since the wikipedia project uses the continuous integration method of development (meaning they always run their own latest code), I saved it locally decided to the site where it's installed, above the docroot so join that it wasn't accessible to site visitorspractice and run off SVN trunk. So, I uncompressed it after checking that it wouldn't accidentally overwrite an existing directorysimply did a <code>svn checkout http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/phase3</code> to get the code.

I performed a diff of the entire tree v. my installed copy using the venerable KDiff3 to get an idea of the magnitude of the code changes; to learn by reading some code changes and get a feel for the 'current best practices'. It also helped me to see what old stuff was deprecated, or that I had lying around as cruft on my filesystem. I figured that when I updated Since it had been a long time since my files with rsynclast upgrade, there was a large delta. I would use the --delete switch didn't want to or have time to remove any of look at all the cruft code improvements so I moved on to the targetnext step.

procedure. There was a lot here, although nothing that impacted the function of my installation.

I copied my filesystem as a backup. This is not explicitly mentioned in the UPGRADE file, but obvious if you want to be able to revert. I copied my database as a backup. I noticed that phpMyAdmin failed silently to create a backup because it exhausted the PHP memory limit. When I say 'failed silently' I mean that it saved the export as a compressed file on my system without complaining, but the contents of that file were the plain-text error message from PHP. I could have increased the script memory limit, but instead I used mysql-admin. The Mysql Administrator client had it's own bug, in that one of my prior backup profiles was somehow corrupt (maybe it no longer existed on the filesystem?) and Mysql Administrator would crash whenever I clicked on that profile. I'll have to figure out if there is a setting file where I can manually remove this 'profile' to prevent further crashes.

php -q ./update.php