foswiki: "Failure processing response from the repository search"

Question

I'm checking for updates to my plugins by going to configure -> InstalledPlugins -> review installed extensions and I get a huge error message with red letters starting with "Failure processing response from the repository search: Failed to eval $VERSION from our $RELEASE = $VERSION;" and followed by a lot of lines about plugins. The first plugin mentioned is "GlobalReplacePlugin"

My foswiki release is 2.1.2

Answer 1

According to gac410 on IRC "some extension doesn't have a numeric string [for VERSION or RELEASE]". In your case it's GlobalReplacePlugin.

Find a file named GlobalReplacePlugin.pm in your foswiki installation and edit it. E.g.:

cd /var/www/foswiki
find -name GlobalReplacePlugin.pm
   ./lib/Foswiki/Plugins/GlobalReplacePlugin.pm
vi ./lib/Foswiki/Plugins/GlobalReplacePlugin.pm

change the lines that read like this:

$VERSION = '$Rev: 2960 (2009-03-10) $'
$RELEASE=$Rev

to contain only the number like this:

our $VERSION = '2960';
our $RELEASE = '2960';

Hopefully it's a bug that will be fixed (in the same IRC I read "But really configure shold not crash [...] Configure really needs to tolerate the older extensions"