User:MarkAHershberger/Weekly reports/2010-W25

CLI installer
I'm happy to report that the cli installer for the new-installer code is now working. Granted, I've only done minimal testing against MySQL and there are still features that I want to add, but this should be a good starting point for automating the tests.

In building this I discovered (and will document) how to use $wgExtensionMessagesFiles to include i18n files in CLI scripts. This was needed for the CLI installer since the code in Installer.php uses i18n'd messages and a CLI adaptation needs the i18n files.

I think what I'm learning while working on the installer will be helpful to other users who want to write maintenance/CLI scripts for MediaWiki, so I will start a page for documenting that today as well.

Other
After seeing that I would be working with robla during my SF visit this summer I decided to ping him on IRC. During our a brief chat, he explained his QA background. It looks like he and I will have a lot of shared interests working on MW code.

It looks like TimStarling reviewed a bunch of the unit testing code. After he identified and fixed some problems he pointed out a long-standing problem that I had been aware of for some time: if the tests are run alone (i.e. without the parser tests) they will modify the production database. Obviously this isn't desirable.

I've been putting off fixing the problem since it means I have to dig into the PHPUnit framework to understand how to construct TestSuites better. Now is the the perfect time to fix this problem.