See below for an extract of the discussion on the recurring disappearance of interface messages recently. It was a mistake for the discussion to unfold on an internal list, but it happened quite by chance, starting with an incident report and developing from there.
--- Ori Livneh ori@wikimedia.org
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Ori Livneh ori@wikimedia.org Date: Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 1:23 AM Subject: Re: [Engineering] Localisation not working on MediaWiki.org To: "Brad Jorsch (Anomie)" bjorsch@wikimedia.org Cc: Bryan Davis bd808@wikimedia.org, Development and Operations Engineers engineering@lists.wikimedia.org
On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 6:56 AM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) bjorsch@wikimedia.orgwrote:
On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 9:37 PM, Bryan Davis bd808@wikimedia.org wrote:
The obvious change that caused this was that `mwversionsinuse --withdb` changed from returning "1.23wmf21=testwiki" to "1.23wmf21=test2wiki". This result is used within scap by the mw-update-l10n script to run the maintenance script that builds the ExtensionMessages file. In theory the exact wiki passed to `mwscript mergeMessageFileList.php --wiki=<WIKIDB>` shouldn't matter, but obviously there are now some circumstances where it does indeed matter.
It looks to me like it has always mattered to an extent: the final result from maintenance/mergeMessageFileList.php is the combination of extensions loaded for the --wiki wiki (e.g. in CommonSettings.php) and the extensions loaded by the script itself from the passed list of extensions. Hopefully the latter is always a superset of the former so that turns out not to matter.
Interface messages went missing again on wikidata.org. l10nupdate ran updates on cawikibooks, where $wmgUseWikibaseClient is false. The theory that the exact wiki shouldn't make a difference is pretty shaky. You should expect to run on testwiki and fail loudly if you can't.
We should rethink our whole approach; I don't have any confidence in the architecture. What is especially damning is not so much the recurrence of failures as the way they were discovered (that is to say: by chance) and the hard time we have had reasoning about their cause and the state of localization on the cluster generally.