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

[Bernie Innocenti]

On 10/10/2020 14.29, Bernie Innocenti wrote:
> 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.

Once again, Just Read The Instructions helped: 
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:VisualEditor#If_you_are_using_Git

I was missing "git submodule update --init".


>>  - 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
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