Welcome to the first weekly project update for Toolhub!
In an attempt to keep our loosely connected group informed about
happenings across Toolhub we will try to establish a regular practice
of collecting updates and sending them out once a week. This week
things reported will be off the top of Bryan's head, but work will
happen soon™ to create some place (probably on metawiki) to record
notes during the week so that they can be summarized and distributed
periodically.
Since this is the first "weekly" summary, and the project has been
doing things for about 2 months, this first update will cover a bit
more than just one week of events. :)
== Advisory council "complete" ==
T258185 was closed by Bryan on 2020-09-14 after Risker agreed to join
the advisory council. We now have representation on the advisory
committee of folks with experience in SRE, Security, Community
Relations, technical volunteering, and on-wiki contributions. More
folks may be invited to the committee if we find large gaps during
discussions of features and needs of the system, but this completes
the list of skills that was previously identified as critical to
initial work.
== Vue.js picked as UI framework ==
T261029 was closed by Bryan on 2020-09-14 after Srishti selected
Vue.js. Srishti initially narrowed the choices for a Javascript UI
framework down to React and Vue.js. Moriel and others made a good case
of adopting Vue.js in alignment with the relatively recent decision by
the now-disbanded Front-end Architecture Working Group (FAWG) to
recommend Vue.js as the future replacement for OOJS and other
component frameworks in MediaWiki. Ultimately Srishti and Bryan
decided that using Vue.js would be technically possible and
politically advantageous.
== Decision record created on metawiki ==
Bryan has started
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolhub/Decision_record> as a
location to collect evidence of decisions made duing the course of
designing and implementing Toolhub. The intent is to create a document
that will help anyone joining the advisory council or implementation
team catch up on the important bits of past discussions. Currently it
documents the UI framework selection and a prior fiat decision to use
an "API first" design process when building application features.
== Dynamic translation research ==
Toolhub will not be attempting to establish its own translator
community. Instead we are hoping to integrate with the existing
translatewiki.net (TWN) community. Currently how that integration will
actually work is undefined, but there are 2 ideas along with some pros
and cons outlined in T259838. We expect to do some tech spike work in
the coming quarter to get a better idea of the feasibility of a web
API integration approach. If that does not seem viable after some
testing we are likely to go with the idea of exporting strings to a
TWN supported catalog format, shipping that catalog to TWN via git
repos (their normal workflow), and ultimately getting translations
back for integration with the application.
Bryan documented an afternoon of research at T259838#6460927 existing
Django apps intended to help with the technical issues of translating
user provided content stored in the application's database. High level
summaries of the functionality of each app are available on the
Phabricator task.
== Toolinfo v1.2.0-draft01 json schema published for review ==
Bryan did a review of the data model documented by James Hare during
the 2018 work on Toolhub to refresh his understanding of the design.
During this review, the lack of toolinfo.json support for declaring
the URL of end-user facing documents seemed like something that should
be revisited. This had been brought up in 2018 by Kunal on the data
model talk page [0]. James explained that he had set this field as an
"annotation" value to be added thorough Toolhub rather than a
toolinfo.json publisher controlled value in a hope of supporting links
to both 'official' and community created documentation. Bryan agrees
with the need to allow documenting community created documentation
links, but felt that we can figure out how to deal with competing
links in the user interfaces.
A new v1.2.0-draft01 json schema is now on metawiki for review [1]. A
"final" v1.2.0 schema will probably not be released until Toolhub
reaches a milestone of a working toolinfo.json submission and storage
system to reduce the documentation churn that theory meeting practice
is likely to expose in the current draft.
== Prototype development environment ==
Bryan has been poking at a local development environment [2] for the
project over the last few weeks. This week he reached a point where he
shared the system with Srishti to see if it could be made to work
anywhere other than Bryan's laptops. That test turned out to be
successful! Srishti reported back that she was able to get the system
booted up on her laptop and returning the expected empty Django
project landing page.
The current system is very experimental and the tooling it uses may
change significantly before we hit any deployment milestones. The
current system is using Docker Compose to manage multiple Docker
containers (initial one for the Django app and one for a MariaDB
database), Poetry for Python dependency management and versioning, and
a custom Makefile to make using it all a bit easier for the developer.
Today only git, Docker, Docker Compose, and GNU make are needed on the
developer's laptop. All of the Python and other tooling requirements
are being packed into the development mode Docker containers. This may
or may not be sustainable as we progress out of experimental mode and
start to integrate with the Wikimedia development ecosystem (Gerrit,
Jenkins, etc), but it has been a useful experiment for Bryan who has
not worked locally with Docker extensively.
== Wrap up ==
That's all the news that Bryan can remember today. :)
[0]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Toolhub/Data_model#1.1.0_feedback
[1]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolhub/Data_model#Version_1.2.0
[2]: https://github.com/bd808/toolhub
Bryan
--
Bryan Davis Technical Engagement Wikimedia Foundation
Principal Software Engineer Boise, ID USA
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] irc: bd808
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