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

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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

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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

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Major projects:

Deployment improvements

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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

Caching improvements

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Search (Solr/ElasticSearch) deployment

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Architecture formalization

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  • 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

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  • 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

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