Wikimedia Platform Engineering/MediaWiki Core Team/Quarterly review, July 2013

March 2013

Wikimedia MediaWiki Core Team review July 2013

October 2013

Outline for a review of the MediaWiki Core team which took place at WMF on July 15.

See also: notes from the meeting

Previous quarter

We presented three projects as priorities leading up to June:

• Auth systems (OAuth, SUL, OpenID)
• Volunteer contributed deployments
  • VipsScaler (just a few days of work)
  • Score (nearly all done)
  • Category collation improvements - code review, scripts
  • BlameMaps
• Search

Also, the "as time allows" projects:

• Admin tools - cross-wiki warning messages. Last blocker for global AbuseFilter

Other projects that were on an as time allows basis:

• review queue process - Greg will figure out logistics on this, working to make sure we cover both architectural readiness (e.g. Tim's review) and product scope (e.g. Howie's review).
• Release cycle - Should we aspire to a faster cycle than once every 2 weeks?
• Greg & Sumana to move forward on this to formalize the maintainership of the tarball & related activities.
• Test infrastructure: What role should beta play in the deployment cycle? Do we make people deploy to beta before production, period?

Upcoming quarter

Major projects:

Deployment improvements

See Site_performance_and_architecture#Deployment_sprint for the details Generally:

• git-deploy
• monitoring
• deployment script improvements
• multi-site awareness

Specific actions from 6/28 outage:

• periodic backups of /a/common
• mergeMessageFileList.php fixes/re-arch
  • get rid of need of extension-list file? find a more elegant means for collecting a list of message files for caching

Architecture formalization

• Reviewing RFCs
• Completing the architecture document
• Writing RFCs
  • Making possible Oct-Dec 2013 projects more concrete
  • Even if we don't get to it ourselves, providing clear instruction to others (volunteers?) that might take this on
  • Candidates:
    • EditPage refactoring
    • Media handler

Time allowing/secondary projects

• HipHop - more benchmarking, porting the LuaSandbox code, testing
• Admin tools sprint - time allowing. A major push should happen the following quarter with the addition of a Platform PM

Deferred

• Central code repo
• Configuration database
• Gerrit improvements (further BZ integration)