MediaWiki Upgrade

So for the last year-ish, I’ve been running a wiki inside our company. Recently I got my hands on some new hardware to run the wiki, not that wiki’s are that processor intensive. I thought that it would also be a good time to upgrade to a new version of MW since I was running 1.4. Apparently they have made “significant” changes from 1.4 to 1.5, making the upgrade more difficult.

I setup MW1.7 on the new machine much like it was on the old, copied over the images, and LocalSettings.php file. I also dumped the DB from the old machine and imported it into the new. I went into the maintenance directory and ran “upgrade1_5.php” (from the command line, which I might add is not installed by default on debian). That worked well, but I guess it is “experimental” so be careful with your data. Then the fun part — running “update.php” due to some CRAP programming by the MW guys, if you try to run this from the maintenance directory like the last script — it will crash part way through (can’t find the right directory). Of course you can’t re-run the process because part of the tables have been fixed. So roll back to your old data and start again. This time run update.php from the root directory of your wiki and you’ll be set.

Its not like it was _that_ big of a deal, but its is really stupid that a script will half wok from a directory and half not. Come on people, its not that hard to run “cd” inside your applications.