| Lucas_Werkmeister_WMDE added a comment. |
I tried to create a federated setup using the provided documentation, to see if it’s sufficient. I eventually succeeded, but there were some problems. Here are my main takeaways:
- I had no idea how to set up interwiki links, and the first documentation I found was outdated. Is the usual consumer of this documentation assumed to be familiar with this? (In the end it’s just a single SQL statement, so I’d say we could include it anyways.)
- I was not sure what I should put in the foreignRepositories config. What are entity types ('item' (correct) or 'Item' (namespace, incorrect))? Is a symbolic database name the same as a normal database name? What’s the base URI for? (I still don’t know the answer to the last question – the link to the remote item comes from the interwiki URL, not this base URI.)
(It’s possible that this, too, is assumed to be clear to the usual reader, and that I’m just unusually unfamiliar with these terms.)
- I first tried to have local and remote items and properties, and got this error:
> Using same entity types on multiple repositories is not supported yet. "item" has already be defined for repository ""
This is, in my opinion, a very severe restriction. As far as I can tell, this effectively means that a federated setup without the WikibaseMediaInfo extension, or some other extension providing entity types beyond item and property, does not make sense – you need local items (otherwise you don’t have anything to put statements on), so the only thing you can take from the remote repository is properties. The documentation should definitely mention that.
- At one point, I got a really weird error ($wgContLang was null) when I had two entries in the foreignRepositories config. Are multiple entries supported?
- Attempting to configure a repo with no local entities at all ($wgWBRepoSettings['entityNamespaces'] = [];) resulted in an error message in the setup scripts. I assume the interpretation of “empty array ≈ unset variable” is unintentional.
You can also read the full adventure here (CommonMark; paste here to render): F7505963: federation.md
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Cc: LucasWerkmeister, gerritbot, aude, daniel, Lydia_Pintscher, WMDE-leszek, Aklapper, QZanden, Salgo60, Izno, Wikidata-bugs, Mbch331
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