[QA] bitrot on beta labs; removing old javascript

Chris McMahon cmcmahon at wikimedia.org
Thu Oct 31 18:06:43 UTC 2013


Over the past several months, we have seen a number of non-Firefox[*]
builds in beta commons and beta enwiki become less reliable, with
unexpected errors on the page loads being reported in the Sauce Labs jobs.
  Since the errors were intermittent and seemed somewhat random, they were
difficult to reproduce.

But other issues with beta labs recently have been more important, like
resolving the SSL/https problems, supporting VisualEditor and supporting
Flow, etc.

But now I have begun digging in to the source of these intermittent and
random failures.  What I have discovered is a large amount of invalid
and/or obsolete javascript and CSS tucked away in the Mediawiki: namespace,
in common.js, in vector.js, etc.  Basically anywhere a user could put some
javascript, I am finding old obsolete or corrupt javascript. Some of it was
just plain wrong, with unprintable characters, some of it is just obsolete,
and pretty much all of it is unnecessary.

I am deleting it as I find it, and removing this junk source of random
failures will greatly improve our diagnostic abilities.

-Chris

[*] Firefox does not show an error on the page if a broken script file does
not affect the behavior of the page, Chrome and IE do show an error.   The
errors are usually.

Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected end of input
Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token ILLEGAL

If you happen to see any of these, please let us know on the mail list!
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