Topic on Extension talk:Scribunto/Flow

Under "Installation", the page says:

The instructions above describe the new way of installing this extension using wfLoadExtension(). If you need to install this extension on these earlier versions (MediaWiki 1.29 and earlier), instead of wfLoadExtension( 'Scribunto' );, you need to use:

require_once "$IP/extensions/Scribunto/Scribunto.php";

.. however the "current" version (aimed at 1.35) does not ship with a Scribunto.php, and the only previous version listed (aimed at 1.31) which does ship with one immediately fails with a "requires >= 1.31.0" error.

Unless there's some way to acquire an older version, I suspect this is no longer installable on Mediawikis earlier than 1.31, and this section should be replaced with a notice to that effect - I'm on 1.27.4, the dist version for Ubuntu Bionic Beaver. Hv (talk) 16:55, 19 May 2021 (UTC)

Any older version can be downloaded from Gerrit (tgz link) or GitHub (Code → Download ZIP). However, please note that Wikimedia support for MW 1.27 ended quite a while ago, so it can potentially contain publicly known, unfixed security holes. You should update as soon as possible at least to 1.31—its support will also end in a few weeks, but that’s the last LTS version to support PHP 7.2; using APT pinning, I think you should be able to install 1.31 from the focal (20.04 LTS) APT repository. (The best solution however would be upgrading the whole server to focal, which contains PHP 7.4, and then upgrading MW further to 1.35.)

Thanks, that's hugely helpful. This is not a publicly accessible installation, but I should upgrade it regardless. Hv (talk) 14:20, 21 May 2021 (UTC)

Hrm. So Focal (the current Ubuntu LTS) includes MW 1.31, which is itself supposed to be EOL'd in a month. Whereas Focal will be supported by Ubuntu until 2025?

What an incredibly unfortunate accident of timing, to have created this situation. Focal was released just a few months before MW 1.35. And because there was no newer MW LTS release, Focal contains a MW release — 1.31 — that was already nearly 2 years old at that time.

Since a huge part of MW's ecosystem is its wide array of extensions, and since those extensions can't reasonably be expected to continue supporting MW versions that have reached their EOL date (irrespective of Ubuntu's own support timeline), I wonder if there's a case to be made for a Stable Release Updates exception (or at least a backport) so that Focal can be updated to MW 1.35, to ensure that it remains compatible with available extensions?

The alternative would seem to be for Ubuntu to also package MW extensions for their LTS releases, so they can be frozen at a version compatible with the frozen MW release.

That text is boilerplate added by a template; I don't know if the template supports customizing or removing the text for one specific extension. That being said, MediaWiki 1.27 (the last LTS version prior to 1.31) has been unsupported for almost two years now, and MediaWiki 1.31 (the current LTS version) is scheduled to become unsupported next month; I'm curious whether the template should just be changed to omit this text by default and require a per-page opt-in to include it again.

Yes, it supports with |registration=required (instead of |registration=Yes), but I agree that the default should probably be registration-only (unless a newer version is specified in |no-registration-version= and unless it doesn’t support registration at all).

At least the 1.31 download (which is selectable from the download link for the other versions) still contains Scribunto.php, so presumably that would still be useful for users on older versions as well.

That being said, if MW <= 1.29 are all completely unsupported at this point, and extensions are being shipped without the files indicated by that old boilerplate, then IMHO those instructions should definitely at least be hidden by default. (We could stick them inside a collapsed DIV, "Instructions for older installations", or something... and include a mention in there that it might be necessary to download an older version of the extension source, to use the require_once installation method.)

As the OP said, the REL1_31 version contains Scribunto.php, but still explicitly refuses to work if extension registration is not available in the MW version used.

(Also, a slight correction to @Dinoguy1000):

MediaWiki 1.31 (the current LTS version) is scheduled to become unsupported next month

Using the terminology from Version lifecycle , MediaWiki 1.35 is current LTS version; 1.31 was the previous LTS, and current "legacy support version" (whatever that means). It would be weird for the current LTS to suddenly go unsupported next month.

Having noticed that the {{MWReleases}} box (which is displayed in lots of places) seems to have a different concept of LTS versioning than the Version lifecycle article does, I've brought that up at Talk: Version lifecycle.