Topic on Talk:Wikimedia Engineering Architecture Principles

It is not completely clear to me what scope of software engineering activities this document is intended to apply to. From the title I can infer that MediaWiki is in scope, but "other Wikimedia engineering endeavors" is really, really vague.

Does it apply to:

• Puppet code used to automate Wikimedia servers?
• Non-MediaWiki user facing web applications (for example https://scholarships.wikimedia.org)?
• Indirectly user facing services (for example the dynamicproxy deployments used by Cloud Services)?
• Non-MediaWiki cli tools developed by Wikimedia (for example scap)?
• Gadget code deployed to Wikimedia wikis?
• Lua code deployed to Wikimedia wikis?

Thanks Bryan -- that was one of my concerns as well. Similarly, it talks about "software that interacts with users", but it's unclear to me what that is envisioned to be. Is it wiki-users, third-party MediaWiki users (so e.g. sysadmins), users of third-party MediaWiki installs, API consumers, development communities, Cloud Services users etc. etc.

"software that interacts with users" should perhaps be clarified by adding "though a graphical user interface".

The idea is that this document should govern all engineering decisions, including all the areas mentioned by Bryan - but of course, not all principles are applicable in all contexts. dynamicproxy doesn't need internationalization, and puppet code doesn't need to be re-usable as a library.

Are developers considered users in this context? For example, should API sandboxes support i18n? Or things like Quarry? If the answer is yes I'm not sure a MUST requirement is realistic (although we should certainly strive for it more than we do now).

Yes, developers should be considered users, and the UIs of developer tools should be localized. The Special:ApiSandbox is already fully localized (yay!). Quarry should be, at least if it's an official WMF tool. For tools written by volunteers, the principles can of course not be enforced, but following them should still be encouraged.