(apologies for cross-posting)
I'm happy to announce that HHVM is available on all Wikimedia wikis for
intrepid beta testers. HHVM, you'll recall, is an alternative runtime for
PHP that provides substantial performance improvements over the standard
PHP interpreter. Simply put: HHVM is software that runs on Wikimedia's
servers to make your reading and editing experience faster.
You can read more about HHVM here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/HHVM
* How do I enable HHVM?
You can enable HHVM by opting in to the beta feature. This short animated
gif will show you how: <http://people.wikimedia.org/~ori/hhvm_beta.gif>.
Enabling the beta feature will set a special cookie in your browser. Our
servers are configured to route requests bearing this cookie to a pool of
servers that are running HHVM.
* How do I know that it's working?
Opting-in to the beta feature does not change the user interface in any
way. If you like, you can copy the following code snippet to the global.js
subpage of your user page on MetaWiki:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Ori.livneh/global.js
If you copy this script to your global.js, the personal bar will be
annotated with the name of the PHP runtime used to generate the page and
the backend response time. It looks like this:
http://people.wikimedia.org/~ori/hhvm_script.png
Edits made by users with HHVM enabled will be tagged with 'HHVM'. The tag
is there as a precaution, to help us clean up if we discover that HHVM is
mangling edits somehow. We don't expect this to happen.
* What sort of performance changes should I expect?
We expect HHVM to have a substantial impact on the time it takes to load,
preview, and save pages.
At the moment, API requests are not being handled by HHVM. Because
VisualEditor uses the API to save articles, opting in to the HHVM beta
feature will not impact the performance of VisualEditor. We hope to have
HHVM handling API requests next week.
* What sort of issues might I encounter?
Most of the bugs that we have encountered so far resulted from minute
differences in how PHP5 and HHVM handle various edge-cases. These bugs
typically cause a MediaWiki error page to be shown.
If you encounter an error, please report it on Bugzilla and tag with it the
'HHVM' keyword.
We're not done yet, but this is an important milestone. The roll-out of
HHVM as a beta feature caps many months of hard work from many developers,
both salaried and volunteer, from the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia
Deutschland, and the broader Wikimedia movement. I want to take this
opportunity to express my appreciation to the following individuals, listed
in alphabetical order:
Aaron Schulz, Alexandros Kosiaris, Brad Jorsch, Brandon Black, Brett
Simmers, Bryan Davis, Chad Horohoe, Chris Steipp, Erik Bernhardson, Erik
Möller, Faidon Liambotis, Filippo Giunchedi, Giuseppe Lavagetto, Greg
Grossmeier, Jack McBarn, Katie Filbert, Kunal Mehta, Mark Bergsma, Max
Semenik, Niklas Laxström, Rob Lanphier, and Tim Starling.
More good things to come! :)
Please consider sharing this invitation in your communities.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: *Quim Gil* <qgil(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Subject: FOSS OPW: looking for female technical contributors
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, Wikimedia
Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Dear wikimedians,
The Free and Open Source Souftware Outreach Program for Women offers paid
internships to developers and other technical profiles working on projects
together with free software organizations. Wikimedia is participating
again, and we welcome candidates.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/FOSS_Outreach_Program_for_Women/Round_9
This call is open to Wikimedia volunteers (editors, developers...) and also
to people that would contribute for the first time in our projects. In the
past editions we have seen that candidates coming through a direct
recommendation have good chances of success. It is also known that many
good potential candidates will be reluctant to step in, but they will if
someone (like you) encourages them to apply, or to contact us with any
questions.
You can make a difference. If you know women with software development or
open source background / interest and full time availability between
December and March, please forward them this invitation. Thank you!
--
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
--
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
For your information. Forward to your communities is welcome, especially if
you know you have contributors using Bugzilla, a tool that is planned to be
deprecated by Phabricator in a few weeks.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: *Quim Gil* <qgil(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Tuesday, September 16, 2014
Subject: Phabricator update
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi, if you were wondering what is going on in Phabricator land...
Summary: You can see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org , you can touch
https://phab-01.wmflabs.org/ , you will have a chance to provide feedback
about the Bugzilla migration before the migration, based on a test instance
with a sample of bugs imported.
In detail:
* https://phabricator.wikimedia.org exists as a read-only instance and it
contains the tasks that were migrated from the now decommissioned
fab.wmflabs.org. Registration is disabled while we fix some tasks --
details at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Plan#Migration_plan .
We will post here when the issues have been fixed.
* We have a test instance at https://phab-01.wmflabs.org/ where you can
play as much as you want. This instance is for testing and experimenting
only. Anything in there can disappear in a whim.
* When we open phabricator.wikimedia.org, the creation of new projects will
be still disabled. Existing projects will be able to continue their work,
but we are asking new projects to wait a few weeks, until we complete the
Bugzilla migration. It's going to be still a bumpy road before Day 1, and
we want to control the impact of these disruptions as much as possible.
* RT migration will follow. Details will be shared in advance.
* Bugzilla migration will follow. Details will be shared in advance as
well, but we have a rough idea of the sequence of steps. Details available
in the migration plan linked above, pasted here for convenience:
1. Earliest possible/expected date: October 06 but favoring Friday
October 10 to interrupt engineering less (starting over the weekend).
Bugzilla downtime expected of 1-3 days. Checklist:
2. Instructions to use Phabricator for bug reporting and project
management.
3. Documentation of data and features that will not be available in
Phabricator after the migration.
Phabricator test instance available with a sample of Bugzilla reports
imported automatically (say 1 of each 10, about 700 reports).
4. At least one week of margin to receive community feedback and
implement improvements.
5. Documentation of the migration process detailing sequence of steps and
timeline expected.
6. Go-NoGo meeting with the Phabricator team (Andre, Chase, Mukunda,
Quim), Erik, Rob, MarkB, and Greg.
Stay tuned. :)
--
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
--
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
Hello and welcome to the latest edition of the WMF Engineering Roadmap
and Deployment update.
The full log of planned deployments next week can be found at:
<https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments#Week_of_September_15th>
A quick list of notable items...
== Monday ==
* Revert Wikidata to a known-good version due to issues that were found
on Thursday's deploy
* Update CentralNotice to remove dependency on jquery.json
** <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/158103>
* Japanese Wikipedia to get Cirrus Search as the primary search
experience
== Tuesday ==
* Commons to will get the new CirrusSearch as the primary search engine
* MediaWiki deploy
** group1 to 1.24wmf21: All non-Wikipedia sites (Wiktionary, Wikisource,
Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikiversity, and a few other sites)
** <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.24/wmf21>
== Wednesday ==
* Russian Wikipedia to get Cirrus Search as the primary search
experience
== Thursday ==
* MediaWiki deploy
** group2 to 1.24wmf21 (all Wikipedias)
** group0 to 1.24wmf22 (test/test2/testwikidata/mediawiki)
* There will be a method to opt-in to using the new HHVM-powered backend
for all WMF wikis. It'll be implemented via a BetaFeature to make it
as easy as possible for people to participate. There should be no
noticeable negative impact and hopefully only positive impacts.
Thanks and as always, questions and comments welcome,
Greg
--
| Greg Grossmeier GPG: B2FA 27B1 F7EB D327 6B8E |
| identi.ca: @greg A18D 1138 8E47 FAC8 1C7D |
Hi everyone,
This is a quick notice and a call for help from translators: likely next
week, we'll be launching a new experiment aimed at helping newly-registered
editors, called task recommendations. You can check out the UI by looking
at the design specification (
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Task_recommendations) and our research
documentation (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Task_recommendations/Experiment_one
)
The good news: the main interfaces are well translated enough for us to
launch our A/B test in 12 languages...
- English
- German
- French
- Spanish
- Italian
- Russian
- Chinese
- Ukrainian
- Swedish
- Dutch
- Hebrew
The bad news: we needed to add some error messages for the rare occasion
that something goes wrong. These are *almost* merged and will ideally also
get translated too.
If you speak these languages and/or know someone who is a translator on
Translatewiki, then it would be great to keep an eye out for untranslated
strings coming soon in the GettingStarted extension.
If you're curious about how the recommendations are generated or anything
else, let me know. :)
Thanks,
--
Steven Walling,
Product Manager
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
Hey,
Starting with version 1.24wmf21 (which will be deployed to production wikis
starting 11 September), MediaWiki will no longer execute JavaScript code on
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 (previously the cutoff was MSIE6, as of last
month).
This is for the same reasons that we stopped JavaScript on MSIE6 [*] – the
browser is not actively supported by its manufacturer, and this prevents
users with this browser from experiencing a number of bugs.
As with last week, this change will be communicated through tech news as
well, but please help carry this message into your communities as
appropriate.
[*] -
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-ambassadors/2014-August/0008…
Yours,
--
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester(a)wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
Dear tech ambassadors,
According to our plans, we are just a few weeks away from Wikimedia
Phabricator Day 1. On that day, Bugzilla will be accessible in read-only
mode, and all the bug reports will have been migrated to Phabricator. From
that point, all bug reporting will be done in Phabricator.
We are very excited about this move. Phabricator provides a friendlier
environment to new/casual users while offering a powerful collaboration
platform for software development and project management in general -- all
at once! For instance, users can edit task descriptions, one task can be
assigned to more than one project (or none), and tasks can be organized in
project workboards (i.e. http://fab.wmflabs.org/project/board/31/ ).
Learn about the launch at http://fab.wmflabs.org/T282. You can subscribe to
this task to receive any updates.
This Day 1 is also relevant for other migrations (RT, Trello, Mingle, even
Gerrit at some point) but first of all we want to make sure that the
Bugzilla migration is well communicated and understood across all Wikimedia
projects. For that, we need your help.
We are planning the communication activities at http://fab.wmflabs.org/T317
-- feedback and volunteers are welcome.
Learn more about Wikimedia Phabricator, and how we got to the point we are
now after nine months of discussion and work:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator
If you need help using Phabricator or you see other users with problems,
check/improve https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Help. Support is
provided at the related Talk page.
We will continue sending major updates to this list between now and Day 1.
As always, we welcome your questions and feedback.
--
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
I have some CirrusSearch updates!
1. We've started setting Cirrus as the primary search backend for wikis
again. Cirrus and Elasticsearch are holding up - and I don't believe we
have any horrible bugs at this point. Is everything looking good on your
side? Here is the schedule (from
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Search#Wikis):
Wiki Primary Date About 30 (mostly) wikipedias
<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/142590/> June 30 About 30 more
(mostly) wikipedias <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/142606/> July 1
Commons Sept 2 plwiki Sept 4 svwiki Sept 8 eswiki Sept 9 nlwiki Sept 10
jawiki Sept 15 ruwiki Sept 17 zhwiki TBD frwiki TBD dewiki TBD enwiki
TBD
2. We _believe_ we've found the performance bottleneck that is preventing
us from deploying to enwiki and dewiki. We're super excited about it!
Nik
