Website Notice: The wiki is down 🙁 (UPDATE: Fixed)

I was going to post something about Yume ni Aruku, but, after upgrading the server to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, the wiki is now down. From what I know, it’s an issue that resulted from upgrading PHP from 5.x to 7.0. I’ll try to fix the issue as soon as possible, but I have no guarantees. As such, the wiki will remain down until further notice. The wiki is now fixed.

The issue, I believe, stems from differences between PHP 5.6 and 7.0 with regards to the APCu extension. The version of MediaWiki I use on this site is 1.26.2. With the upgrade, MediaWiki no longer detects APC. APC is needed for caching by the wiki, and I’d prefer not to go without caching.

The root cause of the problem was that Ubuntu did not have the “php-apcu-bc” package, which is necessary for backwards compatibility with APC for PHP 7.0. Because MediaWiki uses APC, and not APCu, this resulted in MediaWiki not detecting it anymore (as it no longer existed). Therefore I had to download the apcu_bc package directly from PECL and compile it, as well as creating the necessary ini files and symlinks. After finishing all of that, there was one more issue, which stemmed from a poorly-written extension (namely, it used the variable $_ twice in function definitions; PHP 5.6 allowed it as it was often used to denote unused, yet reserved arguments, but PHP 7.0 disallowed it). After fixing that, the wiki is now up again.

On the other hand, this blog is still up (otherwise, why would you be able to read this?). Although, the blog was temporarily down due to one of the plugins being poorly written (i.e. it used self outside of a class in a possible case of blind copy-pasting, something which PHP 5.6 allowed, but prohibited by PHP 7.0). Fortunately, I was able to fix this.


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