Environments

When you test an installer, you need to test the installation of extensions. I made the choice to build copies of MediaWiki environments. My assumption is that the functionality of great environments is what would be of interested to many people.

Referata provides a best practice environment for Semantic MediaWiki. Yaron, the man who runs Refarata is also behind many of the Semantic MediaWiki extensions. Obviously the secret sauce of Referata is Yaron's ability to fix whatever comes his way.

I informed Yaron about the test environment, we found some issues and he fixed them for us.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Installng Metavid

As we are developing and testing the Wikiation Installer, we are recreating  relevant configurations. Metavid is the open video archive of the US Congress and the Metavid software will be the basis of video support for MediaWiki. People are interested in learning about these software developments and being able to build such environment is fun.

The metavid profile brought several things to me that were new. There are programs external to MediaWiki, programs that are not part of the LAMP stack that are prerequistites. We do not want to install such programs from within the installer but we do want to be able to test for such prerequistites. At this stage, we do not test for this, we leave this on our "wish list". 

I had to install a SQL script in order to install metavid tables in the MediaWiki database. This was beyond me. Kim helped me out and now I have an example that I can copy. Now that the files install, I also needed a way to know that the files had installed. Michael Dale, the developer of Metavid suggested to use phpmyadmin. This was an attractive suggestion but, it does add to the clutter in what should be a clean environment. 

What to do.. With hindsight the answer was obvious; one of the tests checks if new tables have been added to the database. So eating our own dogfood was in order. The isolation check was revived and indeed tables proved to have been added for Metavid.

I may have done a good job. I do not know as I do not how to test the functionality of this metavid environment. 

Thanks,

       GerardM

258 out of 359 extensions can plausibly be installed with the naive installer

We are developing a test environment for MediaWiki. In order to test MediaWiki and its extensions we have to be able to install them. The "naive extension installer" makes a good faith approach to installing an extension. At this stage we call an installation a success when the install does not break MediaWiki.

NB We have installed the latest version of an extension on the latest version of MediaWiki at the time of testing.

When 72% of the extension can be plausibly installed, a lesser percentage will still need all kinds of things done before it is functional. All kind of other things may need to be addressed like configurations and what not. We already support the Configure extension for that ...

In all this info glut about installing extensions there is one other really important point: this is the first automated test of all extensions. This is the very start were we start to inform you with test results.
Thanks,
       GerardM

PS Is _your_ extension part of the 258 installable ones ???

More extensions installed

We have made some great progress with the testing software.. Yesterday, the Babel extension failed to work properly. Some research showed that the current virtual machine runs an older version of PHP. Now that it works, we learned that the Babel extension needs some changes to the CSS.

It may sound odd, but working with the code, testing and learning what more needs to be done works well for us. We have made a lot of progress.

Over the weekend MinuteElectron and Denny have worked on an install script for Semantic MediaWiki. This is basic Semantic MediaWiki only. It installs clean and it uninstalls clean.

The next thing to get on-line is the Configure extension; we hope that this will give us even more possibilities in our testing environment.
Thanks,
      GerardM

First iteration of a naive extension installer

In the Wikiation Extension Testing Environment, we want to test extensions. These extensions have to be installed. To install an extension, you have to have a script to install a script ... Hmmm, that sound like work. Who is going to do that... Hmmm, we could write a "naive installer", that would solve 60/80% of the required scripts.

So Kim wrote a naive installer and it just does do a naive install. In the fosdem.wikiation.nl environment I abused the Brion wiki and installed the InputBox and the Babel extension. One of the two worked, both should have worked. Testing is nice.
Thanks,
GerardM

The Wikiation extension testing environment is getting ready for business

The Wikiation extension testing environment has been made available in the WMF SVN.This is good news because more people can see what we are actually doing and what we already achieved.

At FOSDEM we demonstrated the environment to Brion. We promised him that an environment would be made available for testing. The environment has now been made available to him at http://fosdem.wikiation.nl. It is a virtual server where MediaWiki and extensions to MediaWiki can be installed and tested.

The objective of the environment is to have a way to determine if an extension works well on a specific platform. and in combination with a specific MediaWiki release. It is not been clear at all what extension works well with what stable release of MediaWiki.

In order to be able to test, we have to be able to install MediaWiki and its extensions. We are getting good at installing MediaWiki. We are now working on getting better at installing extensions. We need a generic script for the installation of extensions, then we need to be able to install a particular version from a particular branch and then we also want to be able to install a "stable" version.

Our idea of a stable version is that it does not crash MediaWiki and that it passes the tests we have for the extension and the system. This means that when an extension does nothing, it is acceptable ...  Now as I understand it, it take an agile mind to appreciate why this is a good idea.

When I have time, when I am not blogging, or doing admin, or sleeping, I am also working on documentation. I documented how to install the Wikiation Installer ... I used bash for that. :) who needs documentation, the code makes it obvious :)

Thanks,
      GerardM