thanks a lot for testing it out and reporting on your findings! I am sorry that it was so difficult to get it installed. For the next version, or possibly the next version + 1, I am planning to try to wrap the script with Ruby and 7zip in one package, so that everything you’ll need will be included. I’ve also made the script simpler, and I will simplify the instructions.

I hope you find it useful, and feel free to spread it to your friends. Keep an eye on this space for an updated and quite improved version within a few days.

Thanks
Stian

Have tested with wikipedia-id-html.7z and wikipedia-fr-html.7z , works with both.

System :

Xubuntu 6.10
i had “p7zip-full” already
didn’t know !!!ANYTHING!!! about ruby

I had the same problem than Walter , dump and ( wiki-html.rb + wiki-lib.rb ) were not in the same directory.

And at the begining i didn’t know really what to do about ruby, i read README.txt and went in Synaptic and didn’t know what to install , then i started with :

ruby1.9 wich download and install the followings :

libruby1.9 (1.9.0+20060609-1)
ruby1.9 (1.9.0+20060609-1)

but still didn’t know what to do with this , tryed “man ruby” and “ruby -h” in a terminal
reply “command not found” or something like that !!!!

i found this page :

http://www.rubyist.net/~slagell/ruby/getstarted.html

and with this command

ruby -v

i discovered that i don’t have any ruby installed !!!

( later i discovered also how to launch wiki-html.rb with this , in a terminal
” ruby /full_path/wiki-html.rb ” )

finally i decided to run

” sudo apt-get install ruby ” in a terminal

i can’t remember exactly what was installed ( though i suppose it was libruby1.8 and ruby1.8 and may be ruby )

and then it worked !!!!

About “where to publicize this” , i found the link here http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Static_version_tools

But it’s true that beetween meta and MediaWiki web pages it’s quite messy to find up-to-date documentation about those topics

did u try any MediaWiki mailing lists ?? ( dunno which exactly )

Anyway your tool seems quite simple to install finally then Bravo !!!!!

Serpico

thanks a lot for testing it and getting back to me.

Your comment is noted - I definitively need to upgrade the
documentation a bit. i started out with this syntax

ruby wiki-html.rb /wikipedia-no-html.7z no

and as far as I know, this will still work (although I am thinking
about cleaning this up). I then started working on cache, automatic
pre-extraction of the most important things, etc, and interlanguage
links, and it made so much more sense to assume that they were in the
base directory with a specific file name format. But I will specify
this more clearly.

You are right - it is snappy because the file is small With a 60 MB
file it’s quite different - because 7zip was never optimized for this.
We’re working on it though

Let me know if there are any other places I should publicize this, I
am still worried that people this might be useful for might not know
about it. (Of course, once I get 7zip to work better, and make better
installation routines, I might try to make more of a splash - this was
more to get developer/power-user input anyway)

Thanks a lot
Stian

Have tested it and it works fine. Also very fast. But that can be becuase I have used the dump of a very small wiki (3,5mb)

System;
GNU/Linux Ubuntu 06.10
Installion done of “ruby” and “p7zip-full” (did not work with “p7zip”) with synaptic

It did not worked at first because I had not put the dump in the same subdirectory.

That did give the output;
Initializing…
./wiki-lib.rb:29:in `initialize’: undefined method `+’ for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError)
from ./wiki-html.rb:49

If that can maybe put a notice in it like ***Make sure you have put the wiki-dump.7z file in the same directory as wiki-html.rb ***