Blog/2015

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Release: NONE (2015-12-27 22:00 Sun)

I'm skipping the release again. There were two minor changes, but neither seem to be enough to warrant another version. As always, if anyone notices any serious issues, please do let me know at either https://github.com/gnosygnu/xowa/issues or gnosygnu at gmail.com .

I did release Russian wikis this week. See: https://archive.org/details/Xowa_ruwiki_latest

I've spent a lot of time this week on the new Android version. I've actually reached a point this weekend wherein it is working with English Wikipedia.

For 3.1.1, I'm going to try to release this new Alpha with for Simple Wikipedia. My aim is to get a release of English Wikipedia shortly afterwards.

For wikis, I'll try to do a refresh of French Wikipedia.

Release: NONE (2015-12-20 22:00 Sun)

I'm skipping the release this week as well. I've spent the week working on the new Android dump format for gallery, as well as a new database merge feature. I haven't found anything worth a release.

I posted the English image updates at [1] I'm working on Russian now, and they'll be ready next week.

For 2.12.4, I'm still working on the new Android version for Simple Wikipedia.

Release: NONE (2015-12-13 19:30 Sun)

I'm skipping the release this week. I've been working on Android-related changes, so there really aren't any significant changes.

I posted Arabic wikis at https://archive.org/details/Xowa_arwiki_latest I ran into an issue with English Wikipedia though, and am rebuilding the dump. It should be ready by the middle of the week.

For 2.12.3, I'm continuing work on the Android version for Simple Wikipedia. For wikis, I'll try to do Russian

Release: v2.12.1.1 (2015-12-06 21:30 Sun)

v2.12.1 is a minor release. It has several fixes directly affecting Italian Wikisource pages, and a few minor parser fixes for other wikis

Wiki bundles for Italian wikis

The Italian wikis have been posted to archive.org

Minor fixes for Italian Wikisource

These fixes addressed the following:

  • Poems with references would show duplicate references at the bottom of the page. In addition, the text of the references may be incorrectly placed in the body of the poem.
  • Image maps with scribunto code relying on the page title generated script errors.

Minor parser fixes including mapsource extension

These fixes are several, but the following are notable:

  • Scribunto code calling json-decode was failing if the code was relying on integer keys. For example, {"1"="a"} needs to parse 1 as an integer, not a string. Otherwise, code calling ipairs would later fail
  • Mapsource functions such as {{#deg2dd}} would not handle non-ASCII double apostrophes. For example, ’’ needs to go to '' and then to ". XOWA was doing the 1st part ('') but not the second (")

Next release: v2.12.2

I spent a good deal of time working on most of these minor fixes, so my progress on Android was limited. However, I did get a text version of Simple Wikipedia working with the new dump and the new UI. I'm planning to work on images this week, and hope to have a new beta for v2.12.2

For wikis, I'm generating English now. I'll try to add Arabic this week as well.

Release: NONE (2015-11-29 19:30 Sun)

This week will be another skipped release. I've only made very minor changes this week, so it didn't seem worth it to make a new release.

I did post wikis for Dutch and Latin at https://archive.org/details/Xowa_nlwiki_latest and https://archive.org/details/Xowa_lawiki_latest

For 2.12.1 I'm going to finish up the dump and try to get another Android version for Simple Wikipedia. For wikis, I'll work on Italian.


Release: v2.11.4.1 (2015-11-22 20:00 Sun)

v2.11.4 is a minor release. It has one fix affecting French Wikipedia pages, and another for the simple-mode Category system.

Fix for "long-vertical scrolling" on French Wikipedia

In v2.11.2, I added a fix to handle extraneous pre sections: see #Fix for extraneous pre-sections in References. It turned out this fix was not correct, and caused pages in French Wikipedia to have large scrolling sections.

I reverted the fix for v2.11.4. As it turned out, the issue with extraneous pre sections was handled by the underlying templates themselves.

Fix for simple-mode Category pages not loading

XOWA generates a simple Category system when it builds a wiki (this is called v1). If you want an authentic version of the Category system (this is called v2), you can always import it separately under Import offline.

The simple Category system looks like it broke some time ago during the general database redesign from .sqlite3 to .xowa. I fixed it for this release.

Wiki bundles for French, Lithuanian, Limburgish, Estonian, Latvian, Nynorsk, and Cebuano wikis

There were a lot of wikis this week, but they were mostly small. These have been uploaded to archive.org:

Next release: v2.11.5

I was able to do a basic HTML dump for simple wiki, but there are still a number of issues. These should be fixed this week, and hopefully I can try the new HTML dump system on English Wikipedia.

For wikis, I'm going to work through the last of the old .sqlite3 wikis and go through Dutch (nl.*) and Latin wikis.

Release: v2.11.3.1 (2015-11-15 20:00 Sun)

v2.11.3 is a fairly minor release. It addresses one minor bug with "1. REDIRECT" showing up on pages.

Fix for "1. REDIRECT" showing up on some pages

This was a bug I introduced while fixing another issue in v2.11.2. Some pages would now show "1. REDIRECT", most notably en.w:Earth

Wiki bundles for Slovak, Slovenian, Galician, and Waray-Waray wikis

These have been uploaded to archive.org:

Next release: v2.11.4

I fixed the one minor Wikibase issue, but am deferring a few other possible issues till later. I'm still chugging away on the HTML dump. My aim is to get a simple wiki dump for the next release.

I generated the English Wiki dump but there were only about 3 thousand new images, and I didn't feel that it merited an update. For wikis, I'm going to update French, and then go through as many as I can of Lithuanian, Limburgish, Estonian, Latvian and Nynorsk.

Release: v2.11.2.1 (2015-11-08 22:00 Sun)

v2.11.2 is a significant release. It addresses minor, but noticeable issues with gallery sections, location maps, and references. It also has some Wikibase fixes.

Fix for Gallery rendering vertically instead of horizontally

Wikimedia added a change a few weeks ago to force <gallery> tags to use a css. See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T110709 This resulted in galleries being shown vertically, instead of horizontally.

v2.11.2 now includes this css.

Fix for Location maps not working on non-English wikis

This has been a bug for a few months, but I had misdiagnosed it as bad Module code. Basically, non-English wikis would copy-paste the same Module:Location_map code in to their wikis. This failed to work in XOWA, because:

  • The Module code has a hard-coded reference to Template
  • XOWA actually generates the non-English name for Template for the wiki. For Croatian Wikipedia, this is Šablon not Template

This basically broke location maps in non-English wikis. I should have caught this earlier, but the first few I looked at were all bad usages (no location coordinates passed).

v2.11.2 now uses the canonical name just like MediaWiki.

Fix for extraneous pre-sections in References

I think this is also a recent bug, but I can't track down the actual cause. MediaWiki has inconsistent logic for trimming whitespace around template and link arguments. The one at issue was a piece of code like {{TemplateName| B\n }}. On my local version of MediaWiki (1.25.2), it doesn't trim the "\n " after the B and creates a <pre> section. However, on Wikipedia, it does trim the whitespace and does not create a <pre> section.

I think this behavior changed recently, but couldn't find the actual line of code in MediaWiki. For now, XOWA will automatically trim end whitespace for all template arguments. In my opinion this is more intuitive behavior anyway.

Minor Wikibase fixes

These are a handful of signficant fixes that only affect some several dozen pages. They are in brief:

  • in Lua code, entity.formatPropertyValues('P123') would not work. Note that entity.formatPropertyValues('property_name') did work
  • Lua code expects a "datatype" property on entity and a value of "globe-coordinate".
  • Lua code required actual numbers for quantity ("99"), not the literal Wikidata value ("+99")

Minor fixes for Redirect

These are two minor items worth more explanation:

  • Redirects would not work if they had an argument. For example, #REDIRECT [[Target_page|link=collapsed]]
  • Clicking on "Redirected from" links at the top of the page would not work. For example, try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK and click on "Redirected from UK"

Minor JTidy fix to always enclose body text

This was actually not working from the start. Basically tidy needs to take something like ... 

<div class="floatleft">a</div>a1<div class="floatleft">b</div>b1

... and add some <p> tags to produce ... 

<div class="floatleft">a</div><p>a1</p><div class="floatleft">b</div><p>b1</p>

This has a noticeable visual effect for some wikis (Croatian Wiktionary) which have HTML like the above.

I modified the jtidy_xowa.jar to handle this behavior.

Wiki bundles for Danish, Serbo-Croatian, Croatian, and Estonian wikis

These have been uploaded to archive.org

Next release: v2.11.3

I made some good progress with the rewritten HTML dump feature this week, but am still not done. I'm hoping to get ready for v2.11.3 but I need to work on a few other minor issues that have spilled over from this week. (namely in Wikibase).

For wikis, I'm generating 2015-11 English Wikipedia. I'm also going to continue through the minor wikis and try to do Slovak, Waray-Waray, Slovanian and Galician

Release: v2.11.1.1 (2015-11-01 19:30 Sun)

v2.11.1 is a minor release. There are a few minor fixes for Hebrew wikis.

Minor fixes for Hebrew wikis

v2.11.1 now supports Hebrew dates for the time function like {{#time:xhxjj xjx xhxjY|28-08-1608 + 341 days}} generating ד' ה'שס\"ט". In addition there is basic support for Hebrew grammar like {{grammar:prefixed|וabc}} generating ווabc.

Image packages for English Wikipedia, Hebrew, Norwegian and Vietnamese wikis

The English Wikipedia update for 2015-10 is finally up. The rest of the wikis are up at archive.org

Next release: v2.11.2

I've been working on a new UI for the Android alpha. I've also spent time rewriting the HTML dump. For the next few weeks, I don't expect to do anything with the desktop app outside of bug fixing.

For wikis, I'll move on to Danish, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian and Esperanto wikis

Release: NONE (2015-10-25 20:00 Sun)

I'm skipping the release this week. I spent most of the time this week on the HTML dump as well as Android. I'm looking at doing the regular monthly release next week but don't expect any major issues.

I'm also working on the wikis below and will post during the week.

Release: v2.10.3.1 (2015-10-18 20:15 Sun)

v2.10.3 is a minor release. There are a few minor fixes for issues related to v2.10.2.

Minor fixes

There are two worth mentioning:

  • Commons wiki would not download files
  • Mediawiki would not handle the translate function

The rest are more trivial in comparison. You can check the Change_log for more detail.

Image packages for Serbian, Malay and Bulgarian wikis

I'm uploading Bulgarian now, but the rest should be ready at archive.org. See: https://archive.org/details/Xowa_srwiki_latest https://archive.org/details/Xowa_mswiki_latest and https://archive.org/details/Xowa_bgwiki_latest

Next release: v2.10.4

I'm still waiting on commons / wikidata before doing an English Wikipedia update. I'll work on Hebrew this week and Norwegian / Vietnamese as well.

For code, I'm going to change tack again and table the article update function. I'm working on a different XOWA Android UI with hopes of updating the alpha in the next few weeks.

Release: v2.10.3.1 (2015-10-18 20:15 Sun)

v2.10.3 is a minor release. There are a few minor fixes for issues related to v2.10.2.

Minor fixes

There are two worth mentioning:

  • Commons wiki would not download files
  • Mediawiki would not handle the translate function

The rest are more trivial in comparison. You can check the Change_log for more detail.

Image packages for Serbian, Malay and Bulgarian wikis

I'm uploading Bulgarian now, but the rest should be ready at archive.org. See: https://archive.org/details/Xowa_srwiki_latest https://archive.org/details/Xowa_mswiki_latest and https://archive.org/details/Xowa_bgwiki_latest

Next release: v2.10.4

I'm still waiting on commons / wikidata before doing an English Wikipedia update. I'll work on Hebrew this week and Norwegian / Vietnamese as well.

For code, I'm going to change tack again and table the article update function. I'm working on a different XOWA Android UI with hopes of updating the alpha in the next few weeks.

Release: v2.10.2.1 (2015-10-11 22:45 Sun)

v2.10.2 is a major release. It has a critical fix for the 2015-10 English Wikipedia dump. It also features better functionality for Chinese / Serbian language wikis. Finally, it also has some significant under-the-hood changes

Fix for broken references in 2015-10 English Wikipedia dump

XOWA was showing broken references on 2.6 millions pages for the 2015-10 English Wikipedia dump. This was due to some recent changes in Module:Citation/CS1. Specifically, the number of local variables in the citation0 function was greater than the default 200 limit for Luaj.

I recompiled a new version of luaj_xowa.jar to fix this issue.

Language support for Chinese / Serbian languages

This item basically involves the following changes:

  • Serbian languages now have language dropdowns. For example, sr.wikipedia.org now allows you to switch between Cyrillic and Latin variants
  • Chinese and Serbian wikis now fully implement the "-{}-" syntax. This includes some significant functions like recursive conversion, word-interchangeability, and adhoc rule-definition. See: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Writing_systems/Syntax

I'm really hoping that the new functionality matches MediaWiki. If you're a Chinese / Serbian user, please take a moment to spot-check a few pages and let me know if there is anything amiss.

Better support for <source> and <syntaxhighlight>

MediaWiki recently changed the <syntaxhighlight> extension away from geshi to Pygments. In the process, it looks like they changed a few of the general parsing rules as well. v2.10.4 has better support for these blocks, though actual syntax coloring is still some time away.

Full support for interwiki links

v2.10.2 now incorporates online calls to Wikimedia APIs. The first use was to download a full list of interwiki aliases for each wiki. For those users in offline mode, you can manually generate the list. For more info, see Dev/Design/Site_config

Support for Dansguardian import filter

XOWA supports custom creation of wikis by matching articles against words. For example, you can create an English Wikipedia that doesn't have any Pokemon articles. Or you can create an English Wikipedia that just has Pokemon articles. The system is intricate but should be quite powerful. For more info, see App/Xtn/Import/Dansguardian

More source code cleanup

There was a lot of source code cleanup. The process is still ongoing as I'm working on removing old code, as well as rewriting some knottier sections.

Next release: v2.10.3

I didn't have time to generate any wikis this week. I'm going to do English, Serbian and one of Malay, Hebrew, Bulgarian for v2.10.2

For code, I'm going to start working on an article update function (update the offline article with the latest version from online Wikipedia).


Release: NONE (2015-10-04 22:00 Sun)

I'm skipping the release this week. I ran into some issues with Chinese / Serbian translations, though I think I'm pretty close to being done. In addition, I have some other significant changes in queue which I didn't want to introduce for a "first-week-of-the-month" release.

If you want a recent stable release, use v2.9.4.1. I'll keep that release up for a month.

Otherwise, next week's v2.10.2 will have more changes. I'll also resume generating wikis from the list below.

Release: v2.9.4.1 (2015-09-27 20:45 Sun)

v2.9.4 is a very light release. It has a few minor fixes. Most of my time this week was spent on Chinese / Serbian translation.

Minor fixes

There is only one change worth more detail. I was using default values for Wikidata date precision which caused Script Error's to show on a few dozen Hungarian pages.

Image packages for Hungarian and Thai wikis

These wikis are available at https://archive.org/details/Xowa_huwiki_latest and https://archive.org/details/Xowa_thwiki_latest

Next release: v2.9.4

For images, I'm going to work on Serbian, Malay, Hebrew and Bulgarian

For development, I'm going to introduce the the Chinese / Serbian language translation.

Release: v2.9.3.1 (2015-09-20 19:00 Sun)

v2.9.3 is another light release. It has a few fixes for Chinese wikis.

Handle new relative urls for CSS

Wikimedia changed their url format for CSS resources this week. Previously it used to be "//simple.wikipedia.org/w/...". Now it is just "/w/..." Unfortunately, since XOWA didn't handle relative-style urls, the CSS files weren't being downloaded for new wikis. This is fixed now.

Parser fixes for Chinese wikis

After building the images for the Chinese wikis, I noticed that there were issues with blank message boxes and blank reference text. It turned out that these were broken by the language dropdown back in v2.8.1. I spent a good deal of time fixing these issues, but realized that the current implementation of variant handling (-{zh-hans:text}-) needs to be rewritten.

The current version is much better than the last version, but there are still some changes that need to be done.

Minor source code reorganization

I spent a good deal of time reorganizing the main XOWA project codebase. In particular, XOWA had a lot of extra "Source Folders" in addition to "src". These folders arose from the C# to Java conversion and C# having a broader scope for a non-public class than Java (in C#, non-public classes can be seen by classes across namespaces).

Source code cleanup is an ongoing process, but this should make a substantial difference.

Image packages for Portuguese, Romanian, and Indonesian wikis

These wikis were fairly straightforward. See https://archive.org/details/Xowa_ptwiki_latest https://archive.org/details/Xowa_rowiki_latest and https://archive.org/details/Xowa_idwiki_latest

Next release: v2.9.4

For images, I'm going to work on Hungarian, Thai and Serbian.

For development, I'm going to put the Math parser to the side and work on rewriting the Chinese / Serbian language translation

Release: v2.9.2.1 (2015-09-13 21:00 Sun)

v2.9.2 is another light release. It has a few minor parser changes.

Updated images for English and Chinese wikis

These updates were uploaded to https://archive.org/details/Xowa_enwiki_latest and https://archive.org/details/Xowa_zhwiki_latest . I'm still uploading English now, but it should be there in the morning.

Minor parser changes

I made a few minor parser changes to handle articles in Romanian, Turkish and Finnish wikis.

Next release: v2.9.3

For images, I'm going to work on Indonesian, Romainian and Portuguese.

For development, I'm still working on the Math parser and some infrastructure items.

Release: v2.9.1.1 (2015-09-06 20:00 Sun)

v2.9.1 is a light release. It adds a new Graph extension.

Added Graph extension. Diagnostics/Javascript/Graph

MediaWiki recently began incorporating a new Javascript-centric extension for making graphs. They only show up on a few pages, but I wanted to make sure XOWA handled them before they show up on more.

Removed Mac OS X DMG

I ended up removing the Mac OS X DMG. The main problem is that future updates (for example v2.9.1) would actually overwrite any existing wikis. I'll reinstate the DMG at a future release, but I'll need to make some XOWA changes to allow customized user wiki folders.

Updated images for German and Turkish wikis

These updates were uploaded earlier this week to https://archive.org/details/Xowa_dewiki_latest and https://archive.org/details/Xowa_trwiki_latest .

Next release: v2.9.2

For images, I'm going to work on Chinese, Indonesian and Romainian.

For development, I plan to work on the Math parser and some more infrastructure items.

Release: v2.8.5.1 (2015-08-30 20:15 Sun)

v2.8.5 is a light release. It includes a DMG for Mac OS X and moves the images from /user/anonymous/app to /bin/any/xowa/file

New Mac OS X DMG

I spent some time putting together a DMG file for Mac OS X. For now, it's only for 64-bit versions (Snow Leopard and up).

Image update for Ukrainian and Finnish wikis

These updates were uploaded earlier this week to https://archive.org/details/Xowa_ukwiki_latest and https://archive.org/details/Xowa_fiwiki_latest .

I was planning to upload German, but Wikimedia kicked off a new cycle over the weekend. I'll review German this week and upload accordingly

Images moved from /user/anonymous/app to /bin/any/xowa/file

I moved all files and images out of the "/user/" file hierarchy. Basically, I'm planning to reduce "/user/" to only a few files or directories. CSS files will probably be moved out within the next few months as well.

Next release: v2.9.1

For images, I'm going to continue image updates with German, Turkish and Indonesian.

For development, I plan to keep v2.9.1 light, so will work on either Android or other long-running items

Release: v2.8.4.1 (2015-08-23 21:40 Sun)

v2.8.4 is a light release. It supports 7 new Wikimedia wikis and has some Firefox addon fixes.

Image update for Persian and Bengali wikis

Persian wikis are at https://archive.org/details/Xowa_fawiki_latest and Bengali wikis are now at https://archive.org/details/Xowa_bnwiki_latest . Persian is still uploading but should be ready by the morning.

Import Wikimedia wikis with non-consistent language (ar.wikimedia.org; br.wikimedia.org)

This was reported in https://github.com/gnosygnu/xowa/issues/21 . Basically, there were 7 new Wikimedia wikis with inconsistent language codes. For example, ar.wikimedia.org was not for Arabic Wikimedia, but for Argentinian Wikimedia. Unfortunately, this required some rewrite of the url code as XOWA assumed that the language codes were consistent: for example, "ar." always meant Arabic.

Minor fixes for Firefox Addon

There were a few issues with images not loading and sidebar links not working. See https://github.com/piotrex/XOWA-Addon/issues/2 and https://github.com/piotrex/XOWA-Addon/issues/3

Next release: v2.8.5

For this week, I'm going to continue image updates with Ukrainian, German and Finnish.

I spent some time on Math parsing this week, and may continue on this for next week. I'll try to work in some Android dev, as the alpha hasn't been updated for 2 months now.

Release: v2.8.3.1 (2015-08-16 21:15 Sun)

v2.8.3 is a significant release, but mostly from an infrastructure point-of-view. It has several application startup and deployment changes. It also has an update for English Wikipedia 2015-08-05

English Wikipedia images for 2015-08-05

The update itself contains about 157,000 new images. I'm posting v2b tonight and will post v2a and v1 over the next few days. See App/Import/English_Wikipedia#File databases: v1, v2a and v2b

Application startup changes, including splash animation, fatal error window, and .exe changes

v2.8.3 has a number of application startup changes. The most noticeable one is a splash animation to show that XOWA is launching after you double-clicked the exe (or ran the sh).

In addition, I added a "fatal error" window to give more information if XOWA fails to run because of SWT or XULRunner.

Finally, I rebuilt xowa.exe with launch4j. Also, both exe's now support a standalone JRE. If you place a JRE in /xowa/bin/windows/java/jre , it will run on systems without java installed.

Unfortunately, these changes aren't uniform across all operating systems.

  • Windows: All of the above apply
  • Linux: Only the first 2 apply. A standalone JRE will probably not happen due to the many varieties of Linux distros as well as the general Linux philosophy of a central package manager
  • Mac OS X: None apply. I had problems with the splash and the error window, whereas I haven't looked at the standalone JRE. I'll work on these for a future release, though it's difficult to say when.

XOWA home wiki is now a sqlite3 database

When v0.0.0 was first released, XOWA used text files for all its wikis. XOWA has since moved to sqlite3 databases in v0.7.1 but the home wiki still remained in the text file format.

With v2.8.3, the home wiki now is in a sqlite3 format. This should be the start of a number of changes, including better namespaces (everything is in the Help namespace), a functioning Search, image support, and overall better editing. Also, the home wiki will soon be part of the Android Alpha app.

Cleanup of /xowa/ root directory

v2.8.3 now deploys much fewer files to the /xowa/ root directory. This was done primarily to avoid confusion for new users, as well as general deployment aesthetics. All other files have been moved to elsewhere in the /xowa/bin/xowa/ hierarchy. See the Change Log for more details.

For upgrade users, you can ignore these old files in the /xowa/ root directory or clean them up manually. You can also update your app by regenerating the XOWA root directory. See App/Setup/Upgrading and "Upgrading by an xowa_app package and regenerating the XOWA root directory"

Trivial Scribunto parser fix

v2.8.3 has one trivial Scribunto fix that caused "Script error" on about a dozen or so pages in English Wikipedia.

Next release: v2.8.4

Now that English Wikipedia images were finally released, I'm going to resume the long overdue backlog. I'm scheduling Ukraine, Persian and Bengali for this week.

I did some Android development this week, and will work on Search support. I'll also work on any issues the new builds turn up, including one outstanding one for broken Math expressions on some pages: https://github.com/gnosygnu/xowa/issues/10

Release: v2.8.2.1 (2015-08-09 20:25 Sun)

v2.8.2 is a light release. It has another attempt at a fix for the Windows 8.1 issue, and a bunch of minor fixes.

Windows 8.1 support (by upgrading to SWT 4.6M1)

There have been a number of reports of XOWA not working on Windows 8.1. See https://github.com/gnosygnu/xowa/issues/13 and https://github.com/gnosygnu/xowa/issues/14

I was able to get a loaner Windows 8.1, and was able to reproduce the issue. I tried various ways to fix it, but the only thing that worked was upgrading to SWT 4.6M1. I'm hoping it handles the Windows 10 error in http://sourceforge.net/p/xowa/discussion/general/thread/652c6303/ as well as other random reports

If you're running Windows 8 or Windows 10 and it works, please drop by and comment on github or sourceforge

Minor fixes for file download

While generating the 2015-07 images, I noticed a bunch of minor file issues. They affect something like 5,000 images (out of 4,000,000). These were fixed in this release, and will show up in the next image update

Minor fixes for Wikibase

There were a handful of minor fixes with wikibase, primarily revolving around date.

Next release: v2.8.3

Packages were delayed again this week. Part of this is related to the erratic Wikimedia dump server schedule. The other part was due to the file issues found during the English Wikipedia 2015-07 generation.

I was planning to release the 2015-07 update today, but ran across a small issue. In addition, the dumps actually ran early this month, so I'm going to wait a week and release 2015-08 next week. At this point, I'll also regenerate all the other wikis, including Ukraine, Persian, Bengali, etc.

I'm going to focus more on packages this week, with English Wikipedia being the main priority. If I have time, I'm going to work on the home database as well as Android.

Release: Windows 64-bit update (2015-08-03 20:15 Mon)

Unfortunately, I uploaded non-working versions of the Windows 64-bit app yesterday. See https://sourceforge.net/p/xowa/discussion/general/thread/652c6303/

I uploaded a fixed application package for Windows 64-bit now: https://github.com/gnosygnu/xowa/releases/download/v2.8.1.1/xowa_app_windows_64_v2.8.1.1a.zip

I'm going to skip the update package for now.

My apologies for the error.

Release: v2.8.1.1 (2015-08-02 22:15 Sun)

Language conversion dropdown for Chinese wikis

v2.8.1 now supports the language conversion dropdown for Chinese wikis. This enables users to switch between China, Macau, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan conversions for zh.wikipedia.org (as well as other zh.*.org wikis)

Unfortunately, I discovered this doesn't work perfectly for Serbian wikis. I'll fix this in a future release, but if you're a Serbian user, you will have to manually use explicit conversion links. For example: sr.wikipedia.org/sr-ec and sr.wikipedia.org/sr-el

Thanks to anonymous4 for reviewing and testing this feature.

Windows 8.1 support (by downgrading to XULRunner 24)

There were a few reports with XOWA not working on Windows 8.1. See: https://github.com/gnosygnu/xowa/issues/14 . I don't have a Windows 8.1 box, but it looks like the issues were related to the recent upgrade to XULRunner 31. Although XULRunner 31 works fine on Windows 7 and Windows XP, it looks like it fails on Windows 8.1. I downgraded to XULRunner 24 and it looks like that should fix the issue.

Thanks to anonymous#14 for helping me work through it.

Fix for incorrect Main_Page in various wikis

v2.7.2 introduced a bug wherein the Main_Page was incorrectly detected for some wikis. This affected uk.wikisource.org, zh.wikipedia.org, www.wikidata.org and several others. If you've imported a wiki and the wiki doesn't open, please try to import it again with v2.8.1

Scribunto and Wikibase updates

I discovered I accidentally disabled the build warning codes back in February. As a result, a number of minor Scribunto and Wikibase issues accumulated over the past few months. v2.8.1 resolves about 90% of these issues, though there are still a few more to go through.

Various minor fixes

There were a lot of other minor fixes in v2.8.1. Most of these are parser related, but there are a few interesting items under the change section. Please have a look at the Change_log

Next release: v2.8.2

I delayed packages for another wiki due to all the parser issues (particularly the Wikibase ones). I'm going to resume with images for 2015-07 English Wikipedia as well as the still-delayed Ukraine, Persian and Bengali wikis.

For v2.8.2, I'm going to make yet another attempt at converting the home wiki to a sqlite database. A new Android Alpha is still on the list as well.

Release: NONE (2015-07-26 21:55 Sun)

I'm skipping the release this week. I'm working on getting the multi-language dropdown for Chinese and Serbian wikis (and any other wikis with variant languages). I ended up rewriting a lot of internal URL logic to support URLs like "zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/A" instead of "zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/A". I didn't have much time to work on anything else.

I'll resume work on the other items for 2.8.1.

Release: v2.7.3.3 (2015-07-21 23:45 Tue)

Online download sometimes downloads wikis from your.org instead of wikimedia.org

As per https://github.com/gnosygnu/xowa/issues/7 partial dumps were only importable for time zones west of Greenich Mean Time. v2.7.3.3 fixes it for all time zones.

Yet another thanks to Anselm for working through this issue.

Release: v2.7.3.2 (2015-07-20 23:45 Mon)

Online download sometimes downloads wikis from your.org instead of wikimedia.org

Unfortunately, a change in v2.7.3.1 caused XOWA to download wikis from your.org for partial dumps.

Thanks to Anselm for continuing on this issue.

Release: v2.7.3.1 (2015-07-19 20:00 Sun)

New Bookmarks page. See Special:XowaBookmarks

The old version of the Bookmarks page was a simple feature. It basically added bookmarks to the bottom of a wiki page. Unfortunately, it was part of the "home" wiki and used the old text database format. I needed to convert the home wiki for Android, but couldn't do it without breaking Bookmarks.

As a result, v2.7.3 now has a new Bookmarks page. These entries get saved in the user database (C:\xowa_release\xowa.user.anonymous.sqlite3) . In addition, it supports HTTP Server mode. For more info, see App/Bookmarks

I didn't have time to add folder support for this release. I'm planning to add in the future, but it may wait until I can clear more Android tasks out of the way. If you want this feature, please create an issue at github .

Also, many thanks to anonymous4 for assisting with the HTML and CSS.

Fix for Persian Wiki images

It turns out that MediaWiki allows pixel sizes in non-English numbers. For example [[File:A.png|۲۰۰px]] means 200px. Unfortunately, XOWA was interpreting this as no-image-size.

v2.7.3 now supports non-English pixel sizes.

Minor miscellaneous fixes

There were a bunch of minor fixes. None of these are worth further explanation, so please take a quick look at the Change_log

New javascript libraries

The new Bookmarks page uses more Javascript libraries. This includes jquery-ui for dragging and resizing as well as notifyjs for notification messages. I updated the existing jquery script to the latest version and also changed some of the core xowa ones.

This will probably become more of a future trend. Future GUI features will appear in Javascript rather than SWT. SWT / XULRunner is sometimes finicky cross-platform, and difficult to debug / reproduce. Meanwhile, GUI features implemented in Javascript can easily be used by the XOWA GUI as well as HTTP Server and Android.

Next release: v2.7.4

I decided to wait on Ukraine, Persian and Bengali wikis one week in order to generate 2015-07 versions (instead of 2015-06). I'll be pushing them out over the course of this week. In addition, English Wikipedia should be completing this week, so I'm hoping to get it out as soon as possible. I'll then go on to German, French and Arabic afterwards.

For v2.7.4, I'm going to move on to converting the home wiki to a sqlite database. Once that's done, I'll refresh the Android Alpha and try to add Bookmarks as well as bunch of other features.

Release: v2.7.2.1 (2015-07-12 17:40 Sun)

Handle incomplete XML datadumps at http://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html

WMF is currently having problems with the XML data dumps. Unfortunately, it failed in a way to break auto-dump downloading in Import Online. Basically, the "latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2" file is being wiped out in the new multi-phase dump. See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T89273 and https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/xmldatadumps-l/2015-July/001156.html

v2.7.2 now goes back one dump month if the "latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2" is not there. In the case of Japanese Wikipedia, it does this:

Image updates for Spanish, Japanese, and Swedish

I uploaded new wikis for Spanish, Swedish and Japanese.

Support for Extended String Functions for non WMF wikis (Wikia, Nethack)

This was noted in this github issue. Some non Wikimedia Foundation wikis such as Wikia wikis and the nethack wiki use extended string functions like {{#replace}}, {{#sub}}, {{#count}}, etc.. I ended up implemented these, as they were not difficult, and they are prevalent in a lot of MediaWiki installations.

Rewritten HTTP server engine to support POST requests

First, many thanks again to Mattze96 for the great HTTP server. It's been running fine for a year and a half, and been easy to patch. However, new features were needed for the HTTP server including:

  • Support for POST and other AJAX calls
  • Server-side events
  • More logging
  • Unit testing capabilities

Due to the changes involved, a rewrite of the core was easier and than trying to patch the existing piece. The new HTTP server engine is still a work in progress, but it is stable enough to introduce.

In addition, I fixed a bug with the Timeline javascript. For some reason, it failed in Firefox, but strangely not in XULRunner. Thanks to MDE for reporting it.

Minor parser changes

There were a handful of minor parser changes. The most meaningful was support for the {{gender}} function as well as a fix for coordinates and a bad default value of "http:\\/\\/www.wikidata.org\\/entity\\/Q2".

Next release: v2.7.3

I was tempted to include the new Bookmarks page for v2.7.2, but I wanted to hold off and try to add some features such as bookmark folders and drag-and-drop. Unfortunately it's a blocking task for Android, as it stops me from adding the home wiki to Android. I'm going to try again to get it in for v2.7.3. I'll also work on a refresh of the Android Alpha.

For dumps, I'm in a holding pattern until WMF resumes. See https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/xmldatadumps-l/2015-July/001160.html . I'll try to update Ukrainian, Persian and Bengali as they are quite old, but I'm still holding off on English, German, French and Arabic.

Release: v2.7.1.1 (2015-07-05 19:30 Sun)

Upload of English Wikipedia files for Android Alpha

I finished uploading the files for English Wikipedia. Note that these files are just like the 2015-04 set, except that the max file size is 1.5 GB instead of 3 GB. Android can't use 3 GB files.

Unfortunately, right now, there are 3 types of sets for English Wikipedia: v1, v2a and v2b. See App/Import/English_Wikipedia for more details. Users are strongly encouraged to download the new 2015-06 set (v2b), especially if they're going to use Android. However, I will continue to support monthly updates for v1 and v2a over the next year.

For more information on setting up English Wikipedia, see App/Xtn/Android

XOWA droid can now run a complete version of English Wikipedia. Of course, I'll be making many more changes in the upcoming months. If you come across any bugs or have any suggestions, feel free to drop by and give me some feedback as per Help/Feedback

Fixes for CSS generation

v2.7.1 fixes some minor CSS generation issues. The main problem was due to Wikimedia replacing http with https. This would have caused new wikis to have blank logos in the upper left hand corner. If you have a blank logo, try the following (using Simple Wikipedia as an example):

  • Close XOWA
  • Delete this folder: C:\xowa_release\user\anonymous\wiki\simple.wikipedia.org
  • Restart XOWA and visit simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Minor fixes for Firefox Addon

There were some minor Firefox Addon issues that primarily affected Linux versions of Firefox. The most significant one was that the "XOWA Home" button in the toolbar did not work. There were a few other url issues with clicking items in the sidebar.

Fixes for image database generation

I tried to resume image database generation this week, but ran into a few snags. I make a handful of fixes to the image db generation.

Next release: v2.7.2

I spent most of the week on infrastructure for a new Bookmarks page that would work across XOWA versions of GUI, HTTP Server and Android. This UI infrastructure should also be the foundation for upcoming changes to the HTTP server as well as a future rewrite of the Options pages. I didn't want to release this for v2.7.1, but I will release it for v2.7.2. I'm also going to work on getting a new build of the Android Alpha with a few minor features.

I fell behind on dumps this weeks. I'm generating Finnish Swedish now, and will be uploading them during the week. Spanish should follow suit afterwards. Unfortunately, the Wikimedia dump servers look like they are having problems, so I may continue with refreshes of Japanese. Once the dumps resolve, I'll work on updates for English, German, French and Arabic.

Release: v2.6.5.1 (2015-06-28 21:30 Sun)

Updated versions of SWT and XULRunner

XOWA had been using 3-year old versions of SWT and XULRunner. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to update due to this SWT bug: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=429739

Fortunately, this was fixed in the SWT 4.5 major release. As such, I've upgraded both SWT and XULRunner. Although this is a major infrastructure change, it will have probably only three noticeable changes:

  • Large upgrade packages for 2.6.5: Since I'm re-releasing XULRunner, the upgrade packages will be much larger than normal
  • Print button available: This was fixed in SWT 4.3, but I've only been able to include the fix now. See App/UI/Printing
  • Downloading wikis on some Linux distros won't crash: For some reason, some recent Linux distros started crashing under the old XULRunner 10 when downloading items. XULRunner 17 and up doesn't seem to have this problem. See: https://sourceforge.net/p/xowa/tickets/375/

For more information, see: Dev/SWT App/UI/HTML_Browser

Fix for wikis not working because of old image databases

This was broken during the general database redesign in v2.4.3. XOWA was assuming that v1 image databases would have a format of "fsdb.atr.00.sqlite3". Instead some were "fsdb.atr#00.sqlite3". This only affects image databases from late 2013 and early 2014.

For more information, see: https://sourceforge.net/p/xowa/discussion/defects/thread/11a01c27/

Also, thanks to William for patiently working with me to troubleshoot the issue.

Release of English Wikipedia text-only version for Android Alpha

I had a minor snafu in uploading the English Wikipedia html dumps to archive.org. See: http://archive.org/post/1041291/item-does-not-have-metadata-https-ia902300usarchiveorg-editphpidentifierxowa_enwiki_latest However, I did get them uploaded. See App/Xtn/Android

Addition of Special:XowaDiags for troubleshooting

I created a new Special page for helping with general issues. For example, this will list all files in your English Wikipedia directory: home/wiki/Special:XowaDiag?type=fs.check&wiki=en.wikipedia.org

Right now, it's pretty basic, and will change over the next few releases.

Next release: v2.7.1

I'm going to try to keep the next version stable, so I'll probably only work on XOWA droid items. However, I may add a new Bookmarks page for the HTTP server as well as Android.

For dumps, a lot depends on the Wikimedia dump servers. I'd like to work on German, but would rather wait for an official "July" version. I'll probably rebuild Spanish and Finnish.

Release: v2.6.4.1 (2015-06-21 20:22 Sun)

XOWA moving from sourceforge.net to github.com

In light of SourceForge aggressively taking ownership of other open-source projects, I've decided to move XOWA to github.com.

I'm still in the process of transitioning the xowa.sourceforge.net website as well as other links, but plan to be fully off within a month. I'll still check the sourceforge discussion boards, as well as leave some links up for a period of time. But all future releases will be at https://github.com/gnosygnu/xowa/releases/ while discussions will be at https://github.com/gnosygnu/xowa/issues/.

Images not being downloaded due to Wikimedia change from http to https

As per this blog post, Wikimedia has started moving all traffic to https. Some of this seems to have been implemented during the past week. As a result, XOWA was failing in connections to the Wikimedia servers because it was using http.

For v2.6.4, I updated the links to https. Image downloads (and api calls) now work.

English Wikipedia image update for 2015-06-02

This was a long time in coming. The last good build was back in April. The main problem was that the dump server had been offline for all of May. There were also some XOWA issues, and I had to patch the new code to handle v2 as well as v1.

Image updates are currently a little confusing. There are currently 2 versions of image databases for English Wikipedia.

  • v1: These are ".sqlite" databases in "/xowa/file/en.wikipedia.org/" directory. These were released in 2013-11.
  • v2: These are ".xowa" databases in "/xowa/wiki/en.wikipedia.org/" directory. The databases are about 3 GB each. These were released in 2015-04

v1 is obsolete. I needed to make these changes for Android, as well as to simplify future deployments. I will still generate updates for it for the next year, but users are encourage to move over to a v2 series.

Next release: v2.6.5

I didn't get any of the planned changes done for this week, as both the table of contents and bookmarks were large items. I'm planning to work on them over the next few weeks.

Instead, for v2.6.5, I'm planning to release new versions of SWT and XULRunner. This will bring XOWA a little up to date with recent Mozilla Firefox core changes, as well as take care of other defects (primarily, print page)

For wikis, I'm going to upload the English Wikipedia HTML databases, and try to get German going as well.

Release: v2.6.3.1 (2015-06-14 18:50 Sun)

I'm trying something different with blog entries. I'm going to expand upon changes in the current release here, and give a preview of next week's release. I think the prior method was not offering much information. The new way takes more time to write, but hopefully it will be worth it.

With that said, here goes.

Fix for images sometimes not being shown for v1 users

v2.5.4 introduced a bug for users with v1 image databases (.sqlite). Here's a possible use case:

  • User has English Wikipedia v1 image databases (.sqlite3)
  • User upgraded to v2.5.4
  • User imported the latest en.wikipedia.org
  • User no longer sees any images

The problem was that v2.5.4 automatically creates v2 image databases (.xowa) whenever a new wiki is imported. Furthermore, XOWA had logic that said if you had v2 and v1, use v2 first. As a result, the v1 databases were ignored.

v2.6.2 now prefers v1 over v2. This should automatically fix anyone who encountered the problem above. Of course, if a v1 user moves to v2, then they would have to move / delete the v1 databases in order to see v2.

If you find your images are still not working, please post as per Help/Feedback

Mac OS X now defaults to WebKit instead of XULRunner

Mac OS X had two major issues:

  • Web browser would sometimes reset to blank when minimizing or switching tabs / windows: This seems to have been fixed in a later XULRunner release (24+).
  • Hover over doesn't work: This appears to be a known Mozilla/XULRunner issue and may not be fixed for some time. See: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=246830

The first item can be fixed by upgrading XULRunner, but I would also have to upgrade SWT as well. Unfortunately, I'm waiting on SWT to fix a bug before I can upgrade it: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=429739

For now, I decided to move Mac OS X to use WebKit. The initial results looked good.

For anyone curious, this was done by adding "app.gui.browser_type = 'webkit';" to "bin/macosx_64/xowa/cfg/xowa_cfg_os_default.gfs". If you want to change back to XULRunner, change "xowa_cfg_os.gfs" to "app.gui.browser_type = 'mozilla';"

I'm still including XULRunner in the Mac OS X app packages for now, though I may end up dropping them entirely in a future release.

Fixes for highlight-all-words

v2.5.4 introduced multiple highlights when using the find feature. Unfortunately, there were two bugs I couldn't fix for that release:

  • Multiple highlighting didn't work if the find-word occurred multiple times in the same paragraph
  • Multiple highlighting didn't work for the first find after word wrap

Fixing the first was actually difficult, and I ended up rewriting the entire javascript function.

The new version is at /xowa/bin/any/xowa/html/res/src/xowa/find/xowa_find_html.js

Support for Wikidata import by entities

The wikidata dumps have been delayed for a while. The last good dump was http://dumps.wikimedia.org/wikidatawiki/20150330/ In addition, Wikimedia had an outage in the dump service. See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T98585 Dumps have resumed, but it looks like wikidata is queued as one of the last ones.

As I've been delaying the image databases until I got a new wikidata, I decided to do something else besides waiting. Wikimedia also generates JSON dumps and these have been running consistently every week for the past two months. See http://dumps.wikimedia.org/wikidatawiki/entities/

With this in mind, I wrote some very basic import code to build a wikidata wiki from the JSON dump. It's not perfect, but it allows me to make progress with the image databases. For more info, see: Dev/Command-line/Wikidata

More improvements for XOWA droid alpha

I've added a number of improvements for the XOWA droid alpha. The last release would not work on Android KitKat, and probably other versions as well. I've since tested on 2 other devices, and got them working. I've also added quite a bunch of other stability changes.

Other minor changes

There were 2 parser fixes worth mentioning:

  • <q>: XOWA would show <q> instead of quotation marks (")
  • [[Category:]]: XOWA would show blank [[Category:]] at the bottom of many pages. I fixed this by changing the regular expression, but it pretty much requires Java 1.7

Next release

At this point, I'm focusing on uploading an English Wikipedia that can be used for XOWA droid. I'm generating an html dump build now and should have it uploaded in the next week or so. In addition, I'm also going to re-upload the English Wikipedia images as the current v2 batch won't work on Android (they have file sizes greater than 2 GB)

Development-wise, I'm planning the following

  • More changes for XOWA droid including a Table of Contents and Search
  • Change the existing bookmark system to be run from a sqlite database
  • Update the home wiki to run from a sqlite database

Finally, for image databases, I'm only planning to upload the latest images for 2015-06-02 English Wikipedia. I'll be uploading v2 as well as v1 (.sqlite3)

Release: v2.5.4.1 (2015-05-25 01:15 Sun)

v2.5.4.1 is a significant release. In brief, it involved a rewrite of the online file downloading system to use the same system as the offline version. It also includes instructions for building the image databases on Dashboard/Image_databases as well as an Android alpha. It may be worthwhile to go through the items in Change_log

As a side-note, I've not generated image databases for a few weeks. This is due to the dumps being badly broken at http://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html See https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/xmldatadumps-l/2015-May/date.html and https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T98585 .

I'm going to be on vacation for a while. I'm not sure about internet connectivity, but I will try to look at posts at https://sourceforge.net/p/xowa/discussion.

The next release will be June 14th. I'm planning to have more Android-related changes, and hopefully resume image database generation.

Release: NONE (2015-05-17 20:30 Sun)

I'm skipping the release this week. I'm changing the online download mode to go directly to the sqlite databases (instead of #meta), and wanted to have more time to test it.

I don't know when the next release will be. I'm going to be on vacation for late May / early June, so it may not be until June 15th.

As for Android, I ran into a snag over the weekend. I'm going to try to post an alpha this week.

Also, I'll put up another post later this week for generating image databases.

Release: v2.5.2.2 (2015-05-11 21:25 Mon)

v2.5.2.2 is a fix for wikidata import and was broken since v2.4.4. It was kindly reported by Tim Weigel last night as per this link: https://sourceforge.net/p/xowa/discussion/defects/thread/589808fe/

Release: v2.5.2.1 (2015-05-10 21:35 Sun)

v2.5.2.1 supports downloading the wiki logo from a new location. The change was serious enough to delay French and Arabic wikis for this week. I'm planning to upload them during the course of this week. I postponed the search change for punctuation as it looks like a significant change, and I didn't want to commit time to it just yet. I also did some work on the Android version.

For v2.5.3, I'm going to work more on the Android alpha. For wikis, I'll not planning anything aside from French and Arabic.

Release: v2.5.1.2 (2015-05-04 20:55 Sun)

v2.5.1.2 is a fix for Mac OS X users only. Windows / Linux users with v2.5.1.1 can ignore v2.5.1.2. It resolves the problem with the hyperlink clicks being off by 3 pixels down.

Thanks to anonymous4 for picking up the issue so quickly.

Mac OS X issue (2015-05-04 00:25 Mon)

It seems that v2.5.1.1 has a regression bug that affects Mac machines only. Basically, all hyperlink clicks would be off by 3 px down. I'll look into it tomorrow and hopefully post a fix for it then.

Release: v2.5.1.1 (2015-05-03 20:55 Sun)

v2.5.1.1 has a new tabs-interface for the Options page. It also includes a number of thread-related fixes as well as Wikisource related changes. I made some progress with Android and am targeting an alpha release for the smaller wikis this month.

For packages, the Korean wikis are uploading now and English Wikisource will upload tonight / tomorrow.

For v2.5.2, I'm planning on a search-related fix to handle punctuation (searching for "don't"). I'm also going to see what I need to release an Android version of Simple wiki to any interested user. For wikis, I will do the French wikis and maybe Arabic (if the latter is problematic, I'll fall back to Latin).

Release: v2.4.4.1 (2015-04-26 21:55 Sun)

v2.4.4.1 introduces a multi-wiki search feature. The configuration is a bit difficult, but it should be flexible enough to handle most scenarios. See Options/Search. I also made a few more improvements to the general Search behavior. There are also some important incremental fixes from earlier this week.

For images, the last part of German is uploading, and I plan to upload Czech tonight or tomorrow.

For v2.5.1, I'm only planning on minor tweaks to search, as well as anything else that comes up. For wikis, I will do the other English wikis as well as Korean.

Release: v2.4.3.1 (2015-04-19 23:10 Sun)

v2.4.3.1 has some minor cleanup of items from Special:Search. I started working on multi-wiki search, but could not finish it. I also resolved a number of issues including a few around the HTTP server as well as general file retrieval.

I generated images for English Wikipedia as well as the Simple, Polish and Greek wikis. Polish is uploading now, but the rest are done. I'll check the uploads tomorrow and update the archive.org pages if everything is fine.

For v2.4.4, I'll try to get multi-wiki search included. I also have a number of minor items. For wikis, I will do German as well as Czech.

Release: v2.4.2.1 (2015-04-12 22:10 Sun)

v2.4.2.1 improves performance for Special:Search. This took quite a bit of time as I had to rewrite most of the search code while also adding new features, such as background searching. There are still a few loose ends, but I believe the new version is much more usable than the old one.

Unfortunately, neither English, Polish or Greek was done this week. I did download the English 2015-04-03 dump, and except for a few pages, the rest of the wiki is okay. Images should be available later this week.

For v2.4.3, I want to clean up some of the loose ends on Special:Search, and also support searching over multiple wikis. I'll also upload Simple, English, Polish and Greek. If I have any leftover time, I'll go back to Android.

Release: v2.4.1.1 (2015-04-05 19:38 Sun)

v2.4.1.1 introduces new major database layout changes. The main purposes were the following:

  • Generate single-database wikis for smaller wikis
  • Generate detachable multi-database wikis for larger wikis, particularly English Wikipedia. Except for the core files, any other file can be deleted, and the wiki will still function.
  • Consolidate all databases in one directory, particularly the file databases. There will be no more files in /xowa/file/. Instead, everything will go to /xowa/wiki/.

For more info, you should refer to Dev/Design/Database.

These changes involved a lot of rewrite of database code over the past few weeks. I've done testing on my side, but if you notice any issues, please report them to https://sourceforge.net/p/xowa/discussion/general/

For v2.4.2, I'm going to upload English Wiki in the new database layout. They should be up by Saturday at https://archive.org/details/Xowa_enwiki_latest I'll also queue up Polish and Greek afterwards. I'm planning to work on some performance enhancements for Special:Search as well as resume work on Android.

Release: NONE (2015-03-29 20:20 Sun)

So, I'm going to be skipping this week's release as well. The code is mostly done, but I had to rewrite a significant part last night, so I wanted to give it more time to burn in. Polish and Greek are still on hold, and they will be released after English.

At this point, the new changes will be going live for v2.4.1. It's not ideal, but I'd rather have a more stable major than a possibly unstable minor one.

Release: NONE (2015-03-22 20:15 Sun)

I'm skipping this week's release also. I've rewritten most of the code, but I wanted another week to do some more testing. I'm also skipping Polish and Greek, as I want to start releasing databases in the new format.

I won't be skipping v2.3.5 as I'd like to introduce the new database layout in a minor release, rather than a major 2.4.1 one.

Release: NONE (2015-03-15 20:55 Sun)

I'm skipping this week's release. I'm rewriting more of the database code to generate a single-file wiki. I'm also doing the same for files to generate a single-file database. I'm hoping this will help simplify deployment in the future - particularly for Android. The code is stable, but I want a little while longer to review the database scheme. Aside from that, I haven't run into any bugs, so there wouldn't be much point to releasing a work-in-progress.

I did post the latest English Wikipedia images at https://archive.org/details/Xowa_enwiki_latest I also posted Finnish wikis at https://archive.org/details/Xowa_fiwiki_latest

v2.3.4 will include the new database code. I'm also planning on updating Polish and Greek.

Release: v2.3.2.1 (2015-03-08 20:44 Sun)

v2.3.2.1 had some minor fixes. The most major fix was Wikisource not showing full content for non-English wikis. Unfortunately this was related to some of the infrastructural changes last week.

I'm uploading the Italian wikis now, but they will probably not be ready until the morning. I'm going to hold off on Finnish until next week. I did make more progress in Android, and now have MathJax working.

v2.3.3.1 will have Finnish wikis as well as the latest English wiki update. I'm also working on a single-file XOWA database. Other than that, I'll continue ahead with Android.

Release: v2.3.1.1 (2015-03-01 20:18 Sun)

v2.3.1.1 had no real fixes. The Dutch and Latin wikis were rebuilt without any isses, though Latin is still uploading. There were substantial infrastructural changes, though hopefully I won't run into the same release problems from last week. In addition, I finally got a very alpha version of images working on the Android.

v2.3.2.1 will have a rebuild of the Italian and Finnish wikis. I'll continue ahead on Android and try to get a more stable version.

Release: v2.2.4.3 (2015-02-25 08:45 Tue)

v2.2.4.3 was another interim release to fix offline file downloads not working.

Release: v2.2.4.2 (2015-02-24 21:35 Mon)

v2.2.4.2 was an interim release to fix two issues:

  • HTTP Web Server fails to load
  • Online file downloads only work the first time

Hopefully v2.3.1.1 should be more stable.

Release: v2.2.4 (2015-02-23 19:12 Sun)

v2.2.4 included some major changes, the most significant of which was the Scribunto error when files were missing. There were also several involving wikidata.org. I made a lot of source code changes, and the version history will probably continue to be very busy for the next few weeks.

v2.2.4 also included a rebuild of the Russian wikis. Currently, archive.org is having issues so these will probably not be available until sometime Tuesday or even Wednesday.

v2.3.1 will have a refresh of the Dutch and Latin wikis. I'm also working on getting an Android prototype of simplewiki with images.

Release: NONE (2015-02-14 20:12 Sun)

I'm skipping the release tonight. I've spent most of the week making a lot of changes to the file retrieval code, and I'd like another week to make sure things are stable. Also, this month's English Wikipedia release looks stable, so I have no real changes to post. I did upload updates for the English Wikipedia wiki as well as for Simple Wiki

v2.2.4 will include the last of the file database changes. I'm also planning on updating a major wiki -- possibly Russian.

Release: v2.2.2 (2015-02-08 20:52 Sun)

v2.2.2 saw a rebuild of the German wikis. I made a number of small parser changes, but otherwise the German wikis were clean. The German Wikipedia update is running late, so it won't be ready until sometime tomorrow. Aside from the German wikis, I also rewrote much of the database code for the file images.

v2.2.3 will be a refresh of English Wiki. There probably won't be any images, as the Wikimedia dump service is behind, and the commonswiki won't be updated. For Android, I'll move on to building a single database that has both wikis and images in it.

Release: v2.2.1 (2015-02-01 14:35 Sun)

v2.2.1 had only a few changes. I generated the remaining English wikis and fixed a few minor related parser errors. In addition, I continued working on some more database code changes. Meanwhile, I decided to table some of the new Scribunto changes until later.

v2.2.2 will include an update of the German wikis. I'm still making incremental progress on Android, and will hopefully complete most of the database rewrite.

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