Duplicate

So far we assumed that when you want to test MediaWiki and its extensions for a particular environment, you build a system from scratch, run your tests and assess if the new functionality is an improvement over the old. It turns out that the notion that a particular revision of an extension includes the whole of that extension is not sound. Several extensions can not be installed by specifying their revision.

The ability to test if an extension is complete, can be determined by comparing the difference between the functionality after an upgrade or an installation. To do this you have to be able to save an "old" environment. Another reason why the new duplicate function is useful, is because it allows us to speed up large scale automated testing

Syntax:  duplicate MW_installation MW_installation_new

Thanks,
      GerardM

When less is more

When I enter the command ls revisions.mediawiki: I get a long list of revisions. They are in lifo format and it is a long list. When I enter this commond from within the Wikiation Installer in PuTTY, the list has a length that is too much for the PuTTY buffer. It is possible to limit the output by adding "limit 20". This works fine.

When you run the command from Bash, like this: ./installer.py ls revisions.mediawiki: it is possible to add command separated with a pipe. I tried the less and this worked fine for me. That is until I learned that I could break the pipe by pressing the "q" to quit, that gave a traceback.

The good news is that we can inform you what revisions for MediaWiki are available. It is possible to limit the number of most recent revisions, it is even possible to use bash for this and the pipe will get some more plumming.
Thanks,
         GerardM

Proof of the pudding

One of the objectives of the Wikiation Extension Testing Environment is to have the ability to test the functionality of a specific configuration. A prerequisite is the ability to built an environment that has the same configuration.One of the missing components was the ability to install a specific revision of MediaWiki itself. The screen shot demonstrates our new ability to do this.

The way we install our extensions is different from doing it manually. We expect to be able to install and uninstall extensions and consequently each extension needs to be in its own directory. For the Cite and the Special:Cite extension it meant that they are split in seperate directories. They install successfully and do not break MediaWiki so we assume that this is fine.

At this moment we assume that things are fine when the system installs and when we can save a page. Running tests will be our goal once we can reliably build our testing environment.
Thanks,
GerardM

Revisions and Tags

When you are installing MediaWiki or MediaWiki extensions, it is often crucial to be able to install a particular revision or for a particular "tag". I am quite pleased to announce that the Wikiation installer is now able to install both for specific revisions or tags.

This functionality is currently very much bleeding edge. I do not know yet how to apply the tags to the scripts that I already wrote. So I will do some more documentation and some other work...
Thanks,
        GerardM

Working with the Installer

I wanted to test a function of the installer. So I went to the fosdem.wikiation.nl and ran the "update_self" functionality. This broke the installer. So I deleted the installer directory and installed the installer again from the documentation.

This worked fine. To my delight I got the following welcome message:

****************************************
=== Wikiation installer (v. 48376) ===

(last known safe version: 48307)
Interactive mode. Automated testing is disabled.

please type a command and hit enter
help for help
^D, or quit to quit
****************************************

So there is now the latest version or the latest safe version. Now I have to learn how to install the revision that I want to test because that needs to end up in the documentation.
Thanks,
GerardM

Debugging Extension Installation Scripts

When creating extension installation scripts for the extension testing environment, it can be difficult to analyse where issues are in the script. For example, when we were creating the Semantic MediaWiki installation script we did not know why the setup program was not running correctly. Previously, the installer would not output anything from install files and so no debugging was possible. Now, there is a debug flag which allows us to see detailed information - enabling us to find and fix issues far more efficiently than before.

To use this flag, add "debug=True" to your settings.py file.