Wikimedia Technical Committee/Minutes/2020-11-18

The TechCom planning meeting is a weekly invite-only video discussion, generally held on Wednesday 13:00 USA Pacific Time.
See also TechCom-RFC workboard in Phabricator. (Private minutes)

The minutes from TechCom's triage meeting on 18 November 2020.

Present:  Tim S, Daniel K, Timo T.

New RFC: Provide mechanism for overriding configuration for browser tests

• https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T267928
• TT: High time we resource this. Some previous research on this when we transitioned browser tests from Ruby to Node/WebdriverIO. At the time, we wanted to keep the ability to run the same tests against local+CI+beta, which made this rather difficult.
• Moved to P2.

RFC: Discourage use of MySQL's ENUM type

• https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T119173
• DK: yes discourage by default
• TS: Jaime mentioned that ENUM's sort differently from text, but also said we shouldn't ban it outright.
• TT: as proposed sounds right. generally there are better solutions, but as justified optimization specific high-scale uses could be allowed.

RFC: Drop support for database upgrade older than two LTS releases

• https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T259771
• TT: principally seems fine, not aware of concerns. we'd want to make sure we cover the failure scenarios, e.g. not just soft documentation, but actually programmatically detected and prevent disaster. I'll comment on-task.
• DK: Platform team as stakeholder for ..?
• TT: I guess potential veto in terms of what the minimum support should be, and if okay with trailing/dropping, then how long it has to be.

RFC: Expiring watch list entries

• https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T262946
• Last Call ended. Approved.

RFC: Shellbox microservice for MediaWiki

• https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T260330
• TT: Worth noting that it is an optional service. The current logic remains the same as before and Shell-exec call API also remains compatible. The library can effectively now be put into a container and MW configured to use that rather than calling directly.
• Put on Last Call until 2 December.

Next week IRC office hours

No IRC discussion scheduled for next week.