Unable to reproduce upgrading from 1.6.3 to 1.6.6 with
update.php.

Can you please provide some more detailed examples, such as a
list of message pages which were reverted, exactly how they
changed, and what appears in the history for them?

valarea wrote:

Perhaps the bug only occurs when upgrading from 1.6.5 to 1.6.6, as I've
described above, not 1.6.3 to 1.6.6?

Anyway, have a look at
http://www.manuel-charisius.de/valarea/index.php/Spezial:Allmessages
You can see the system messages I changed.

Grey = no change was made
Red = message as provided in the language files
Green = my new version, created by editing this specific message, e. g.
http://www.manuel-charisius.de/valarea/index.php/MediaWiki:1movedto2

After upgrading to 1.6.6, all these changes were lost. The Special:Allmessages
(or Spezial:Allmessages in wikis with the language set to German) page looked as
though I had freshly installed a MediaWiki 1.6.6 - everything was grey again.

I noticed this at all because the sidebar had reverted to the default after I
had upgraded (showing again the "donate" link, for example). As the sidebar is
part of the "Allmessages", my changes made there "Autoren-Website", "Weblog",
"Impressum", etc.) were gone.

I then checked the "Allmessages" and, after realising my changes were gone,
deduced that it had been the whole MediaWiki namespace (nothing more, nothing
less) that had been reset.

Did you:

1. Check the content message pages to confirm that things were

missing or overwritten?

2. Try clearing the objectcache table (or memcached etc if using

those) to regenerate the message cache?

I can see at the URL you provide that the message page exists as
edited by you on April 30, so it doesn't appear to have been
overwritten.

valarea wrote:

Well, as I said, I went back to 1.6.5 (meaning: I restored the pages and the
database to its state prior to today's upgrade attempts). So what you now see is
completely unaffected by the problem.

1. No. I put my trust in the "Allmessages" overview. But the navigation bar was

confirmation enough, since my own links were gone and replaced by the default ones.

2. No. I'm not using memcache. But I might try clearing the objectcache table.

BTW, I just tried to reproduce the bug on a virtual webserver (XAMPP 1.5.1 Linux
with PHP 4.4.1 and MySQL 5.0.18) and failed. If nothing else works, I might just
try and copy the local database to the Debian system as a workaround ...

Both items in 1) would have come from the message cache. Please
check the actual page contents and edit history.

valarea wrote:

Hi Brion,

I just tried again today - and now, everything seems to work fine. No idea what
went wrong yesterday. ;-(

Anyway, thanks a lot for your help. You might mark this bug as invalid now
(unless anybody else starts to complain, which I hope not, of course. ;-)

-Manuel

valarea wrote:

Me again. I think I know what happened, and for developers as well as other
users it may be worth noting:

After upgrading from my initial installation (1.6.3) to 1.6.5, I ran the
following two maintenance scripts:

php deleteOldRevisions.php
and
php rebuildrecentchanges.php

in order to clear out the huge revision history that had accumulated not only in
the MediaWiki namespace, but within normal articles as well.

Now here's the crucial point: Up to the moment I upgraded to 1.6.6, I made no
more changes to the MediaWiki namespace / system messages!

So when I upgraded, the update script had to assume I hadn't changed the MW
namespace at all, and therefore re-initialised it.

Last night, however, after I had restored my backed-up files and database and
thus gone back to 1.6.5, I made a few small changes to the MediaWiki namespace.

And when I upgraded today - voilà: everything worked. :)

So the question whether this is a bug or not is not easily answered. As a
temporary workaround, I strongly encourage users who've changed a lot in the MW
namespace and cleared their revision history to change at least one small thing
in the MW namespace BEFORE upgrading.

Hope this helps, and thank you, Brion, for your support.
-Manuel