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(a)wikimedia.org
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ori Livneh <ori(a)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(a)wikimedia.org>
Cc: Bryan Davis <bd808(a)wikimedia.org>rg>, Development and Operations Engineers
<engineering(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 6:56 AM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie)
<bjorsch(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 9:37 PM, Bryan Davis
<bd808(a)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.