Wikimedia Bugzilla is closed!

G'day wonderful PHP wiki developers,

While PHP versions before 4.3 are not actively supported by MediaWiki, it
nevertheless runs extremely well on legacy PHP platforms.  However I have
discovered an issue that prevents edit conflicts from correctly being resolved
MediaWiki is deployed on versions of PHP before 4.2.0.

The fgets() PHP function can take a parameter of how many characters to read
from a filehandle.  In 4.2.0 and above this is optional, but before 4.2.0 it was
a required paramter.  The wfMerge() function in GlobalFunctions.php does not
supply this paramter to fgets().

The result is a PHP error when trying to manage edit conflicts, which can result
in work being lost if two editors are working on a page at the same time.  The
correction to this is trivial; we simply supply a second parameter to fgets.
This is compatible with all versions of PHP 4.

A patch against MediaWiki 1.3.11 is supplied below.  A value of 1024 bytes has
been arbitarily chosen as this corresponds to the default behaviour of
single-argument fgets() under PHP 4.2.x.

Many thanks for an excellent wiki platform.  All the very best,

     Paul

--- mediawiki-1.3.11/includes/GlobalFunctions.php Thu Oct 28 00:34:51 2004
+++ wiki/includes/GlobalFunctions.php   Tue Feb  8 23:11:46 2005
@@ -849,7 +849,7 @@
          wfEscapeShellArg( $yourtextName );
        $handle = popen( $cmd, 'r' );

-       if( fgets( $handle ) ){
+       if( fgets( $handle, 1024 ) ){
                $conflict = true;
        } else {
                $conflict = false;