Wikitech-l July 2011

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

96 participants
93 discussions

Welcoming Ian Baker
by Alolita Sharma 09 Jul '11

09 Jul '11

Hi All, Please join me in welcoming Ian Baker as Software Developer in the Features Engineering team. Ian's been a software developer for about 15 years. He's worked on projects like the first open-source web framework, a billing system for a regional ISP, a custom video transcoding system, and a sensor-based flamethrower controller. At Wikimedia Foundation, he hopes to code some awesome features, help find new ways for people to share and connect information, help improve the overall Mediawiki user experience, and advance the codebase towards present-day software development practices. Specific interests include data model design, database query optimization, regular expressions, user interfaces, human computer interaction and online communities. Ian has been building large-scale installation art since 2005, and has taught flame effects, fire performance, and fire safety classes at The Crucible and elsewhere since 2006. Ian is a founding member of the art collective Ardent Heavy Industries, including its fire art wing, Interpretive Arson. In other lifetimes, he’s worked as a broadcast engineer, welder, machinist, fire performer, drug educator, EMT, and photographer. And he also enjoys flower arrangement and aerial acrobatics. Wow - that’s a lot of cool interests :-) Feel free to say hello to Ian online or in person at WMF Engineering in San Francisco. Welcome Ian! -- Alolita Sharma Features Engineering Wikimedia Foundation

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wiki markup lacks HTML precision anchors
by jidanni＠jidanni.org 09 Jul '11

09 Jul '11

While I would not list the Mediawiki language as a 'crap' language, I still think it is regretful that one cannot achieve the precision of an HTML <a name="bla"> anchor, to say, make a link to a spot anywhere within a page, whereas with the Mediawiki language, the best one can do is link to the top of a table for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Chinese_phonology#Initials instead of also to a random point within say, giant tables.

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The non-coder friendly weekend sprint: Check pre-1.17 bugs
by mhershberger＠wikimedia.org 09 Jul '11

09 Jul '11

This week, Sumana said she had some people who were interested in looking at old bugs to see if they were still reproducible under 1.17. I decided to steal this idea for a great weekend sprint that even people who are not developers could take part in: Help me look at these bug reports and see if the problems they describe are still reproducible or if the problem has been fixed. If you don't have a test wiki with 1.17 installed, then you can try to reproduce a lot of these on Wikipedia in your user sandbox. If you don't have one yet, you can use this link to load one: http://hexm.de/4w If you come across one that you don't know how to reproduce in your user sandbox or on your own wiki, then add the keyword “testme”. With that out of the way, there are plenty of bugs to test. Here are a few ways to find a good candidate for testing: * There are currently 616 bugs that are explicitly filed against pre-1.17 versions of MediaWiki: http://hexm.de/4e * If you modify the query to remove those bugs labeled “enhancement”, you'll end up with 345 bugs: http://hexm.de/4j * Some bugs just have “unspecified” as the version. There are 1747 MW that were created before 2011-06-22 (1.17's release date) with “unspecified” as the version number: http://hexm.de/4f * Again, if you remove the ones labeled “enhancement”, you come up with 526 bugs: http://hexm.de/4g You can do all sorts of things to reduce the list to nice bite-sized chunks. Here, for example are smaller lists of bugs marked “normal” or higher severity for each version of MW in bugzilla: 1.6.x (11 bugs) http://hexm.de/4k 1.7.x (5 bugs) http://hexm.de/4l 1.8.x (3 bugs) http://hexm.de/4m 1.9.x (14 bugs) http://hexm.de/4n 1.10.x (17 bugs) http://hexm.de/4o 1.11.x (23 bugs) http://hexm.de/4p 1.12.x (20 bugs) http://hexm.de/4q 1.13.x (21 bugs) http://hexm.de/4r 1.14.x (26 bugs) http://hexm.de/4s 1.15.x (42 bugs) http://hexm.de/4t All 1.16 versions (94 bugs) http://hexm.de/4v I'm fascinated by the jump from 26 bugs version 1.14 to 42 bugs in version 1.15 and then the big bounce to 94 bugs in 1.16 and think this is a good area to dig into. I'm interested in *why* that is there, whether it is because of more people checking, better reporting, or (hopefully not) worse solving. Of course, we still need people to look at the “testme” bugs, too: http://hexm.de/4i Finally, if you have followed the steps in the bug and can't reproduce it, please mark it “FIXED”. Comments are always helpful on the bugs, so leave one if you have a question or comment about the bug. Happy Testing! Mark.

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Heads-up: WMF engineering process improvement meetings
by Erik Moeller 08 Jul '11

08 Jul '11

Hi folks, this is a heads-up that Tomasz, Rob, Alolita, CT, Brion, Roan[TBC], Howie and I will be meeting with ThoughtWorks ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThoughtWorks ) Thursday and Friday. Rob and I also got a download from Tim ahead of time. ThoughtWorks has done great work with the fundraising developers (Arthur, Katie, Kaldari) already in helping protect that team from distractions, prioritize its work, and ensure that roles/responsibilities are clearly understood vis-a-vis the fundraising folks in the community department. So, we're now exploring a deeper engagement with ThoughtWorks on problem-solving across the engineering organization. Following initial conversations, the purpose of the meeting tomorrow is to do a deep-dive into a specific problem set: the code review, deployment and release management process. We'll be digging into questions like: 1) What are the best methods to ensure we keep up with the backlog while still maintaining a good clip of WMF priority development; 2) What's a realistic deployment and release cycle to shoot for (for trunk, extensions, branches); 3) How do we dissipate key skills more widely among both staff and volunteers (e.g. deployment, security reviews); 4) How/when can we split "big hairy projects" with integration issues into more manageable chunks; 5) What other high priority improvements do we need to prioritize (e.g. increased test coverage, improvements to the testing frameworks, het-deploy, staging environments, etc.) We're intentionally keeping this first meeting at a manageable size to have a high face-to-face throughput and to explore where ThoughtWorks can best help us. But I'm very much intending to make our thinking public, and to form clear and visible groups around core problems we're tackling, just as we have been doing with all WMF engineering projects. So, I'll keep you posted, and if you have thoughts that you'd like to post ahead of time, please do it onlist or offlist :-) Thanks, Erik -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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Bug solving metric?
by Tim Landscheidt 08 Jul '11

08 Jul '11

Hi, is there any metric defined to see how the bug solving pro- cess has improved over time? The main reason I'm asking is today's two mails regarding bug #24000 ("Update rsvg so styling SVG images with CSS works properly on Commons"). Reported more than a year ago, the solution found early on was to update rsvg. I would have suspected that to do that you execute an "rpm -Uvh" equiva- lent on the server farm and close the bug. Yet for months nothing happened at all, and then some keywords were added, removed and replaced. From an outside perspective, this looks like (much) more energy is spent on managing the bugs than actually squashing them. But that of course is not only an outside perspective, but the biased view of a user who is affected by the bug, sees a possible solution on his screen and experiences the helplessness of being at the mercy of someone else :-). So is there any "scorecard" with more detailed data than the weekly report, i. e. minimum/average/maximum time to closure of bugs/non-bugs, some nice visualizations, etc.? TIA, Tim

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Wikipedia dump (20110620) is 5.8G whereas previous dump(20110526) is 6.8G
by Sezgin Sucu 08 Jul '11

08 Jul '11

Hi, The dump under "Recombine articles, templates, image descriptions, and primary meta-pages" is 6.8GB in http://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20110526/ page, whereas the same dump here http://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20110620/ page is 5.8GB. To be more accurate: http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20110620/enwiki-20110620-pages-article… (5.8GB) vs http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20110526/enwiki-20110526-pages-article… (6.8GB) Any idea why we have such a big difference? Thanks

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Re: [Wikitech-l] [Selenium] IDE test for regressing bug
by Michelle Knight 08 Jul '11

08 Jul '11

Hi Sumana, Sure I would be interestd in writing tests with other tools. I like the record and play option in Selenium IDE to get a feel for the code. I am seeing that TestSwarm is a possible tool that the developers are using. Is there a tool with more of a record and play option, that will not interfere with the pages, to use and become familiar with the code? Feel free to email me offline too. Michelle Knight ------------------------------ Message: 4 Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2011 11:23:30 -0400 From: Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah(a)wikimedia.org> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] [Selenium] IDE test for regressing bug https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29310 To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, mknight1130(a)gmail.com Message-ID: <CAJwy5OXpNu1uC=5=vGz7kzdCbP2zLY5eYNuGFHCKViXmk5XaWA(a)mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Michelle: Thanks for the test & test suite! Just wanted to update you that it seems like fewer and fewer MediaWiki developers are interested in Selenium tests, and many are moving to other tools for automatic testing: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Unit_testing http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Test_framework_deployment#Status:_Permanent_h… http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Selenium_Framework#Selenium.27s_uses_.26_flaws Would you be interested in writing test suites or tests for some of these other tools? Sumana Harihareswara Volunteer Development Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation

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Do we need Selenium for anything anymore? (was: [Selenium] IDE test for regressing bug)
by Chad 08 Jul '11

08 Jul '11

On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 11:23 AM, Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: > Thanks for the test & test suite! Just wanted to update you that it seems > like fewer and fewer MediaWiki developers are interested in Selenium tests, > and many are moving to other tools for automatic testing: > That being said: is there any reason to leave the Selenium support in core anymore? -Chad

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Re: [Wikitech-l] [WMF Staff] Welcoming Ian Baker
by Erik Moeller 08 Jul '11

08 Jul '11

On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 12:29 AM, Alolita Sharma <asharma(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: > Ian's been a software developer for about 15 years. He's worked on > projects like the first open-source web framework, a billing system > for a regional ISP, a custom video transcoding system, and a > sensor-based flamethrower controller. This reflects a change in our requirements for new hires, in response to the Board resolution on openness, which requires us to "work with colleagues to develop practices to discourage disruptive and hostile behavior, and repel trolls and stalkers." If you don't know how to operate a flamethrower ... j/k -- welcome, Ian! Great to have you on-board :-) -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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Apache configuration in mw1.17
by Johannes Weberhofer 07 Jul '11

07 Jul '11

Hi, in release notes of mw 1.16.4 the following was suggested: It is necessary to upgrade MediaWiki to avoid an XSS vulnerability for Internet Explorer clients, version 6 and earlier. Also, if you used the Apache configuration I suggested in the previous release announcement, you should update it to: RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} \.[a-z0-9]{1,4}(#|\?|$) [nocase] RewriteRule . - [forbidden] Is this still suggested in the latest version? I have several problems with file upload, when the option is enabled... Best regards, Johannes Weberhofer -- Johannes Weberhofer Weberhofer GmbH, Austria, Vienna

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Wikitech-l July 2011