Mise à jour de la base de données, veuillez patienter...

For context, see the previous blog post, Sonali's Internship work on the Free Software Directory, part 2

After much work, I finally completed the upgrade of the Directory from the previous long term support version of MediaWiki, 1.27, to the current one, 1.31, which was released shortly after my internship started. I also made some general improvements.

• I downloaded the Semantic MediaWiki extensions using composer;
• I removed deprecated code in LocalSettings.php;
• I ported the customizations to Vector skin to the new version;
• I improved the search bar by placing it in the right navigation panel instead of the sidebar;
• I added the FSF favicon; and
• I spent about a week fixing bugs in the CASAuth and HeaderTabs extensions.

Upgrading the mobile site took more work, and after some testing I decided to switch from the MobileFrontend extension to the mobile friendly Timeless skin along with MobileDetect.

I recorded the shell commands required to set up the server and translated them to ansible commands. Since I was unfamiliar with ansible and yaml, I took some time to learn about it.

Then we performed the final migration. Andrew (my mentor) gave me the latest MySQL dump from the directory and made the old site read-only. I imported it to the new server and ran the upgrade script. Then he migrated the DNS. There were a few small hiccups, but after a few hours, the upgrade was complete.

It was my first internship and my first experience of working in a free software community, and I grew very attached to it. My mentors were very experienced and responsive. I was able to learn a lot from them. I am grateful that I got the opportunity to associate with such an amazing organization. Thanks to Outreachy organizers for giving me a great way to work for a distinguished organization and to develop my skills. Lastly, a big thanks to my mentors, Andrew and Ian, who helped me all along and made my internship a truly incredible experience!

Thank you everyone for helping to make September 18th another successful International Day Against DRM (IDAD)! Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) is an issue we have to face every day. In rallying together for a single day against DRM, we sent a powerful message: DRM is just wrong and we can live in a society without it.

Hundreds of you around the world took action on IDAD: going out into your campuses, communities, and around the Web, and sharing your opposition to how DRM restricts your freedom as a user of software and media. The 17 participating organizations took their own actions, creating videos, releasing reports, and writing articles. Here in Boston, we visited the Apple Store and talked with shoppers about their digital rights and how Apple devices abuse those rights using DRM.

Even though IDAD 2019 is a year away, you can continue taking action against DRM. You can join the DRM Elimination crew and sign up for the Defective by Design email list on DefectiveByDesign.org. You can follow us on social media or join the discussion on IRC on the channel #DefectiveByDesign.

We appreciate everything you did this year, and want to give one last big thank you to everyone who was involved.

Thank you!

Photo courtesy of rafial on Flickr. This image is licensed under a CC BY SA 2.0 license.

• autogen-5.18.16
• bison-3.1
• dico-2.7
• gdb-8.2
• gnupg-2.2.10
• gnu-pw-mgr-2.4.2
• gnutls-3.6.4
• guile-cv-0.2.0
• help2man-1.47.7
• indent-2.2.12
• librejs-7.17.0
• mes-0.17.1
• nano-3.1
• parallel-20180922
• xorriso-1.5.0

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As always, please feel free to write to us at maintainers@gnu.org with any GNUish questions or suggestions for future installments.

For context, see the previous blog post, Sonali's Progress on the Free Software Directory, weeks 1-2

Also, by the time this blog was published, more progress has been made. Stay tuned for more updates.

Mobile view project

I made the licenses section of the Directory mobile-friendly by:

• Changing table tags to divs.
• Using media queries and mobileonly and nomobile tags that are provided by the MobileDetect extension to enable vertical table view for small screens.
• Using if statements to hide headings for table cells with no content in mobile view.

I added a mobile-friendly logo in the header and footer by adding $wgMFCustomLogos in LocalSettings.php.

Mediawiki Upgrade

I took up the task of upgrading Free Software Directory from MediaWiki version 1.27 to 1.31. This version is a long-term stable release of MediaWiki. This project has been a great opportunity for me to learn things like importing MySQL database and troubleshooting site issues on a GNU/Linux server.

MediaWiki version 1.31 comes with more bundled extensions than in version 1.27, like a code editor and a mobile-friendly Timeless skin. I spent my time this week trying to get the site to work correctly, importing the wiki database, and then setting up a new wiki on the development server.

To begin upgrading the wiki, I went through upgrade instructions given in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Upgrading, and then I downloaded the files for the new release locally and performed a GPG signature check on tar file using their public keys and signature available at https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-announce/2018-June/000221.html. After verifying that the file is secure, I decompressed the tarball in /var/www. I went through the release notes of versions between 1.27 and 1.31, to get an idea of the changes that were made. Then I created a user in MySQL and used myloader to import the wiki database. The site wasn’t working so I checked for errors in Apache by checking error logs and used netstat and netcat to check if the Web server is running properly. After fixing a few other bugs, the site began working correctly. Then I set up the new MediaWiki installation, added new versions of extensions in the extensions directory, and added older customizations of the Vector module to the new code.

Things I plan to work on in the coming weeks

1. Modify the Vector module further to obtain correct arrangement of content in the wiki.
2. Add semantic MediaWiki extensions to the new installation.

For context, see the previous blog post, David's Progress on the Free Software Directory, weeks 2-3

Also, by the time this blog was published, more progress has been made. Stay tuned for more updates!

IceCat

Over this period, I worked on various GNU IceCat related issues. IceCat's new API for extensions, called WebExtensions, means that many legacy extensions will soon no longer work on a supported browser and will be for historical reference only. There were some that had never been approved for inclusion in the Directory. We generally don't approve new entries that are only for historical reference, so I deleted them. I deleted IceCatMobile and related addons because we don't list Android apps. I started a buggy entries page to address Mozilla brand name issues in Directory entries. For example, "Firefox" should almost always be replaced with "IceCat."

Pywikibot

I learned how to use Pywikibot to import entries to the Directory with the generous help of a Pywikibot developer over the course of a few days. He wrote a patch to fix an issue that prevented sites other than Wikipedia from being written to a configuration file. Since the Free Software Directory uses CASAuth for login, we did some work to get pywikibot automated login working. I wrote documentation on how to set up Pywikibot to upload files to the Directory.

IceCat addons

I made general improvements and bug fixes to my addons.mozilla.org (AMO)/FSD sync script. For example, I made it clean the titles from AMO for punctuation and other issues so we could reuse them for the Directory. I added the API variable "platform=linux" to the URI to avoid add-ons that only work with Windows.