Template talk:Person

#Invoke ?

I think this means we need Scribunto installed for the infobox template to work... Robin (talk) 17:38, 22 December 2013 (GMT)

It does. I spent ages trying to get the necessary server dependencies up to the required releases. I guess I'll have another go as and when since there have been lots of OS component u/grades since - but haven't the inclination right now. Same applies to removing all those problem properties. I need to psych myself up for jobs like that first --Peter P (talk) 17:55, 22 December 2013 (GMT)

I've had another look at Scribunto. I'm not confident about getting it working any time soon. I think we would be better developing all new templates with SMW and foregoing the WP compatibility on infoboxes. They are generally vastly over complex for WS purposes anyway IMO. I'm happy to leave pages with the Scributo required 'Cite' templates as they are. If a Scribunto miracle happens they will just start working. Otherwise I don't think its much of a loss as is. I'll try to contribute a bit on the 'person' template if you're happy with this because there are lots of pages where it is needed. I'm also warming to the idea of separate namespaces because I feel that trying to maintain extensive WP compatibility whilst majoring on SMW is so much wasted effort --Peter P (talk) 16:39, 6 January 2014 (GMT)

I've just spent another 3 hours on the Scribunto issue to no avail. It requires pcre >= 8.1. I cannot find a single EPEL repo with a version higher than 7.8 (which is what we currently have). I do have an outstanding help request on the Centos forums but will not hold my breath on a successful answer from there. The problem with installing it from elsewhere is that it has to be compiled into php and, since php is core OS stuff and so central to the functioning of everything, I am not going to attempt a non-standard hack at it. I did so with a few things on the old server and it caused no end of troubles which were never fully resolved. Upshot? We need to forget about being able to run any and all Wikipedia templates simply by importing them. There are quite a few existing pages that use 'cite' and we'll just have to live with that; but this template and other potential site dependent ones need to be developed without Lua or Scribunto - for now anyway --Peter P (talk) 14:45, 24 January 2014 (GMT)

I don't even know what EPEL stands for, am not up to speed at all on this. Are RPM packages any use? Robin (talk) 16:06, 24 January 2014 (GMT)

Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux. Installing from an RPM does not integrate the package into php. That requires a separate compile which makes the OS non-standard and risks breaking all sorts of other things. It's certainly possible but the time investment required to keep on top of those sort of issues just isn't worth the candle - in my experience of the previous server anyway. Once bitten, twice shy as they say. --Peter P (talk) 17:44, 24 January 2014 (GMT)

I can understand why you don't want to look into compiling the PHP. Best avoided. What about an RPM for PHP which supports PCRE >=8.1? Do you think this might be worth a look? It doesn't mention the PCRE version, but the PHP version is a good sign and I think it's from December 2013. You know more about this than me, I just changed the version number and googled on it:) (talk) 25 January 2014 (GMT)

Another couple of hours and BINGO!!! - seems to be working OK. I could spend the rest of my life tinkering with bloody technical issues. Anyway, we still have pcre 7.8 but s re-import of the WP infobox template and dependencies plus latest Scribunto extension code from the dev brach of GIT and a tweek to the Lua engine binaries path and we seem to have a working set of templates. This needs watching though. It's horrenously complex and my guess is all to easily broken. --Peter P (talk) 07:55, 25 January 2014 (GMT)