Wikimedia Platform Engineering/MediaWiki Core Team/Check-ins/20140505

who: Brad, Bryan, Faidon, Antoine, Tim, Chris, Dan, Chad, Rob, Greg, Timo, Ori

Monthly report

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2014/April#Platform_Engineering

Bug escalation

• 58881 phpunit 4.0 distributed by phar which is unsupported by mw/core wrapper => can’t test!

Antoine: addshore did a few changes today (linked in bug report). Can use some reviews.

• Timo / Aude stepped in already :-)

Prioritization Process

See email: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-core/2014-April/000054.html

Silence == assent? +1 (bd808)

Job queue

• Meeting tomorrow
• General consensus on things like better monitoring

SecurePoll

• Poll creation UI prototype: http://mwcore-securepoll-test.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:SecurePoll/create
  • Already some changes planned though, and the designers haven’t even looked at it yet (as far as Brad knows)

MediaWiki/CentralAuth token names

Varnish cache vary based on cookies matching a certain pattern. There was a prod issue last week because a new cookie was introduced that ended in “Token”, was served to anons and thus caused a lot of vary chain entries in Varnish. Faidon would like to look into changing the MW/CentralAuth token name to be more easily matched in Varnish without false positives.

Performance / HHVM

• Brad reviewed Tim’s LuaSandbox patch and OK’d it; Tim merged
• Needs to be committed into hhvm-dev tree.
• FSS / wikidiff2 won’t build against latest master.
• Ori tied up with EventLogging migration, Vagrant sprint and Zurich presentations.
• Quick script made to compare parser output with cache (to be run in hhvm)
  • May 22nd (v3.1? v4.0? something like that)

RCStream

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/131040/

• Ops willing to provide operational support provided that is a comparable commitment from us to make this successful. This entails:
  • Fielding feature requests (and rejecting them, for the most part)
  • Supporting a migration from IRC to the feed
  • Misc. community-facing requirements that this setup entails
  • Ongoing maintenance of the Python code
• Timo has stepped up and agreed to co-maintain this codebase.

Concretely, I think a commitment from our side entails the following:

• Providing documentation sample client code
• Make the argument for migrating from IRC and for the proposed infrastructure
• Hold a workshop (at Wikimania, perhaps?) for bot maintainers
• Bug triage

Why this matters: http://blog.hatnote.com/post/81329715894/a-beautifully-prepared-video-wall-installation Yeah, it’s hard to believe that wall is indirectly powered by IRC :-)

Antoine : make sure to get volunteers / bots author involved somehow :)

Deployment tooling / RelEng

• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Release_and_QA_Team/Quarterly_review,_April_2014
  • Specifically https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Release_and_QA_Team/Quarterly_review,_April_2014#Goals_2
• Thursday deploy: Chad pushing the buttons, Dan as stand-in Greg (email to engineering@ forthcoming)
  • Hang on to your pants folks, gonna be a FUN day
• Wikitech checklist for a Thursday deploy: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Heterogeneous_deployment/Train_deploys
  • Give it a look and see what’s missing and/or what you think can be automated better
  • Based on checklist given to Bryan by Sam and added to by Bryan in March
• Trebuchet deploying scap in Beta, patches for production in review
  • Yo dawg.

Search

• Deployed new highlighter to Mediawiki.org (and test, test2, testwikidata)- found two bugs! Yay!
  • Fixing bugs and adding one missing feature. Deploying that tomorrow (probably) and giving it time to soak
• Worked with matanya on irc on Friday - says Hebrew search is worse with cirrus than before.
  • Deploying plugin specifically for Hebrew uncovered bugs mentioned above so we’ll get to round two once that is in beta.
• Swift plugin done. Deployed to beta
  • We need swift in beta for testing
  • Can deploy to prod once new boxes are fully weighted (soon) -- will roll out slowly so we don’t kill swift.
• Having some trouble lately getting patches into Elasticsearch
  • Not 100% sure why but my primary contact just had a baby.
    • Slacker!
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_reproduction ?
• Want to file RFC about killing “Go” behavior from search. It’s a glorified “I’m Feeling Lucky” mode and makes me angry. Dan, can we talk?
  • Would this affect things like Firefox’s search bar?
    • It shouldn’t unless they don’t know how to write code.
      • Does hitting a URL like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=foobar&sourceid=mozilla-search count as not knowing how to write code? Brad would be sad if that required an extra click when “foobar” exists.
        • Firefox doesn’t have to hit that URL if they’re already pulling results from the opensearch API. Anyway, better discussion for an RFC.

Hiring

• YAY :)