Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:06:04 UTC
It would be nice if there were an option (set to default on for the WikiSysop) to be notified about upgrades to MediaWiki. There could be a little notice, like "You have new messages", but "Upgrade for MediaWiki Available". The current version could be in a txt file on some servers somewhere and mediawiki could grab it according to some schedule. (Of course, these details would be worked out later.) Even more magical if the admin could have a 'temp space' which MediaWiki could write to, where it could actually grab the update (or just the changed files) and put it in the temp space, then have the admin run a script generated and placed in there to 'upgrade' mediawiki. This would ensure all wikis stay up to date :) I suppose other things, such as a "compatibility list", could be created for extensions and grabbed when the upgrade is about to be performed. "Warning: You are running the following list of extensions which are not known to be compatible with this new version of MediaWiki. Would you like to proceed?"
If somebody plans to implement this leave it off by default, I just turned off the anonymous proxy check which was slowing wikis on LANs to a halt as they waited for gethostbyname() to time out (which takes ~30 seconds). And to the poster: It looks like what you need is a package management system, they're pretty good at this kind of thing.
While far more mundane than automagical features, this looks like a good place to remind MediaWiki admins about some mailing lists that announce MediaWiki releases and contain URLs that lead (some more directly than others) to the release-notes and downloads : MediaWiki-announce-l at http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-announce , described as the "Low-traffic list for announcements of new MediaWiki releases and security updates". The SourceForge email notifications for new MediaWiki downloads at https://sourceforge.net/projects/wikipedia/ -- click the envelopes in the "Monitor" column. http://freshmeat.net/projects/mediawiki/ and click "Subscribe to new releases". http://secunia.com/secunia_security_advisories/ is higher volume (~10/day) as it covers security advisories for "more than 4500 products", including MediaWiki.
mediawiki-announce is maintained for expressly this purpose. All new releases are announced there as soon as they go live, and nothing else is announced there. An in-wiki solution is cumbersome for little to no benefit, so I'm going to WONTFIX.
