[Systems] Upgrading wiki.sugarlabs.org to MediaWiki 1.35

[Bernie Innocenti]

On 10/10/2020 14.11, Bernie Innocenti wrote:
> I upgraded https://wiki-devel.sugarlabs.org to the REL_1.35 branch 
> ahead of upgrading the main wiki.
>
> This time, the update went relatively smoothly (last time I had to 
> skip ahead multiple releases containing major structural changes). Notes:
>
>  - MW 1.35 is a LTS release. We could choose to stay on it, but we 
> would still have to track the REL_1.35 branch to get security and 
> stability updates. Then, we'd have a more painful update to the next 
> LTS in 2 years. Personally, I'd prefer tracking the official releases 
> every 6 months, but it will be up to whoever volunteers to maintain 
> the wiki.
>
>  - The VisualEditor is now bundled with MW, and does not require 
> Parsoid. However, it's not working on wiki-devel. Still haven't 
> figured why.
>
>  - I noticed from the logs that wiki-devel is being crawled by 
> multiple web spiders. It uses bandwidth and cpu time, so we should 
> disallow it. The main wiki could also use some narrowing rules for 
> robots: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Robots.txt
>
>  - Finally, I noticed that join.sugarlabs.org breaks the MW parser. I 
> figured that removing the Widgets extension fixes it, and then I also 
> found the offending line:
>
>  {{Iframe|See [http://planet.sugarlabs.org Planet Sugar Labs], our 
> blog aggregator |http://planet.sugarlabs.org|900|600|1}}
>
> So I just deleted that line. The Planet doesn't have any new articles 
> since 1 year ago, anyway. Do we use IFrame anywhere else? Can we just 
> disable the Widgets plugin?

Figured out what was breaking the Widgets extension: I had to run 
"composer update --no-dev" also in the extension's directory.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Widgets#Installing_using_Git 
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Widgets#Installing_using_Git>

Just Read The Instructions :-)

Iframe is used by a number of pages, but I'd still recommend removing it 
for ease of maintenance and security. If Wikipedia can live without it, 
so can we.


> Since we're limited on sysadmin resources, I think we should aim to 
> make the wiki as maintainable as possible, which means using a 
> configuration as close as possible to upstream, and as few exotic 
> extensions as possible.
>
> Please test and let me know if you find any problems. I'd like to 
> upgrade the production instance later this weekend.
>

-- 
_ // Bernie Innocenti
\X/  https://codewiz.org/