While updating medawiki to v1.11.1, I created a separate database and tried to import the SQL dump using phpMyAdmin. Unfortunately, the import stalled, leaving me with an empty, white frame in my browser.
Unaware that this was *not* normal, I continued updating mediawiki by running "php update.php" as described in http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Up ... _MediaWiki.
Strange errors occured, and the update.php script stopped with an errormessage:
Super-strange was that this file exists nowhere. It's not in the SVN version, nor in the mediawiki tarballs. However, the actual problem was something completely different:Could not open /var/www/......../maintenance/archives/patch-usernewtalk2.sql"
[SOLUTION]
The default PHP settings (in /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini) have a very low memory limit of 8MB.
Since my DB dump was already >8MB, it was probably truncated, leaving me with a half-filled database. Increasing that value in php.ini to 32MB (for now) solved everything:
memory_limit = 32M ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (8MB)