Topic on Project:Support desk

MediaWiki unable to find diff3 and Git during installation

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Sirius4k (talkcontribs)

I'm trying to install latest mediawiki (1.23.4) on my Synology NAS (MariaDB 5.5.38-0023; PHP 5.5.13) and MediaWiki is unable to find diff3 and git. I installed ipkg and downloaded diffutils 3.1-1, which contains diff3 and tried installing Git via Package Center and later manually (git 1.8.4.2-1), still nothing.

I found here (bottom, "UNIX utility binaries not found") that I should add :/usr/bin to PHP open_basedir, but ipkg installs everything in /opt/bin, so just in case I added :/usr/bin:/opt/bin there, but still not luck.

ipkg repo: http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/cs08q1armel/cross/stable/

What else could I do ?

88.130.124.144 (talkcontribs)

After you have set up the wiki, you can add $wgDiff3 to LocalSettings.php and define the correct path there. I think there also was such a setting for the path to Git, but I don't find it currently.

Sirius4k (talkcontribs)

Thanks. I'll use that.

Do I understand correctly when I think that diff is used for versioning of wiki pages and Git used for updating wiki itself ?

88.130.124.144 (talkcontribs)

That's right. Diff is mainly used to create the diff-views when comparing different revisions in the page history. Git is (only?) used to show version information (Git checkout names) on Special:Version. I think apart from that MediaWiki itself does not use Git at all.

Florianschmidtwelzow (talkcontribs)

> MediaWiki itself does not use Git at all.

Correct :)

> Git is (only?) used to show version information

No :) The version information is extracted out of the git meta data directory ".git", which can be read as "normal" files without to have git installed. So, the version information is visible, when you haven't installed git, too. All you need is the .git directory (or at least the HEAD file in .git/ iirc) :)

> I think there also was such a setting for the path to Git

Hmm, the only one i know is Manual:$wgGitRepositoryViewers, which stores the valid git repositories to link to (in Special:Version).

PleaseStand (talkcontribs)

To be clear, "GNU diff3 not found" means users may get the "Edit conflict" screen more often because MediaWiki will be unable to merge otherwise non-conflicting edits automatically. This could be a big deal on a busy wiki. MediaWiki should still be able to compare revisions in the page history though.

In contrast, "Git version control software not found" merely means that commit dates (though not commit hashes) will be missing from Special:Version, if you have installed MediaWiki or MediaWiki extensions using Git. You can still look up the dates manually by following the links to git.wikimedia.org, or by using git yourself.

> I think there also was such a setting for the path to Git

That's $wgGitBin.

88.130.92.16 (talkcontribs)

Argh! I had checked Category:MediaWiki_configuration_settings before writing that I didn't know the name of $wgGitBin - a pity that this category cannot be displayed on one single page. If it could, I would have found it... :-(

Florianschmidtwelzow (talkcontribs)
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