Wikitech-l October 2012

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

122 participants
136 discussions

1.20rc2 is about 50 times slower (on openSUSE)
by Mark A. Hershberger 30 Oct '12

30 Oct '12

Johannes Weberhofer wrote: > I've started packaging for openSUSE, but after updating my > test-system, I have recognized, that everything is very slow now. > Where it took MW1.19 ~0.3 secs to render a page, I have now to wait > for 12 seconds. Is anyone else seeing this? I haven't seen any responses yet. -- http://hexmode.com/ Any time you have "one overriding idea", and push your idea as a superior ideology, you're going to be wrong. ... The fact is, reality is complicated -- Linus Torvalds <http://hexm.de/mc>

7 16

MediaWiki 1.20 release ready?
by Mark A. Hershberger 30 Oct '12

30 Oct '12

Unless something comes up, I don't see a reason why the RC2 release shouldn't be the 1.20 release. One bug that was fixed since the RC2 release is Bug 40641 - "Links to COPYING and CREDITS on Special:Version should not trigger a download dialog" There is a work-around for this, though, so I'm not sure it *needs* to be in 1.20. Since someone at WMF still needs to make the official release, I guess all that is left is to ask Sam to make an announcement. We can just squeeze the release into October. Mark. -- http://hexmode.com/ Any time you have "one overriding idea", and push your idea as a superior ideology, you're going to be wrong. ... The fact is, reality is complicated -- Linus Torvalds <http://hexm.de/mc>

2 2

Developer's Reading List
by Yuvi Panda 30 Oct '12

30 Oct '12

During the live streamed Brown Bag tech meet, a lot of people kept referring to things they've learnt from one blog or the other. I thought it would be useful to have a page where we collect links to tech blogs that the developers frequent. Would be a very useful discovery tool. Went ahead and created https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_reading_list. Feel free to go ahead, and just dump your reading list in there - I can help organize it. Thanks! -- Yuvi Panda T http://yuvi.in/blog

2 1

Clean up prototype.wikimedia.org
by Krinkle 30 Oct '12

30 Oct '12

Hey all, I thought I'd put together a list of stuff I found running on prototype.wikimedia.org. I have no control over terminating the machine itself, but I intend to clean up stuff that is no longer used so that when it is eventually terminated, ideally nothing runs on it anymore. As you should know by now this server is a ticking time bomb. Since it is fairly unorganised (no central registry of what is and isn't used or by whom), I'll dump it here. Please reply with what you know is or isn't being used anymore. * IdeaTorrent http://prototype.wikimedia.org/ideas/ ** en-idea/ ** en-idea-6.14/ ** en-idea-6.16/ Wikis http://prototype.wikimedia.org/wikis/ * Release-candidate (rc-ar, rc-de, rc-en, rc-pl) * Deployment (d-ar, d-de, d-en, d-es, d-fr, d-it, d-ja, d-ko, d-nl, d-pl, d-ru, d-si, d-sr, d-zh) * Article Creation Branch * FlaggedRevs (de, en) * iwtrans (1, 2, 3) * mwe-gadget, mwe-gadget-testing * TimedMediaHandler (tmh) * Semantic (smw-1) * WM-DE (wmde-b, wmde-s-1) Wiki release-candidate infrastructure: * Backups http://prototype.wikimedia.org/backups/ * Exports http://prototype.wikimedia.org/exports/ * Maintenance http://prototype.wikimedia.org/maintenance/ Items on this lists that do not yield reason to do otherwise before Sunday 11 November 2012 (in 2 weeks), will be `rm -rf`-ed from the server on Monday 12 November[1]. If you own any of these (or ones not listed here) and have no problem with its removal, feel free to ssh in and remove it yourself whenever you feel like. -- Krinkle [1] I intend to remove them separately, not all at once. So if support for a few is shown, I'll still remove the rest. Please reply complete (e.g. "I use X" will mean I keep X, it won't mean I leave Y and Z as well).

3 2

All wmf imagescalers now running ubuntu 12.04 precise
by Peter Youngmeister 30 Oct '12

30 Oct '12

Hi All, As of this moment, all imagescalers are now running ubuntu 12.04 precise pangolin. This should close a number of bugzilla tickets, as well as remove the final blocker for timed media handler. Many thanks to Tim and Faidon for patching/package building for this! I'm very excited by this, but I'd like to not consider this "done" for another could of days. I've been combing through the error logs and nothing new seems to be popping up. That said, this is a very delicate bit of infrastructure, so there is a possibility, albeit a very slim one, that something will be off and we'll have to roll back to lucid until the issue is cleared up. I think this very unlikely, but I would like to note it in case things requiring packages in precise are deployed. I do, however, think that it's reasonable to consider the Rubicon crossed and fix any issues as they arise instead of rolling back. And now onto the other apaches! --peter

6 5

Reminder: Tech chat tomorrow
by Erik Moeller 30 Oct '12

30 Oct '12

Reminder that we'll have one of our weekly tech chats tomorrow, with video from the WMF office and other Hangout participants broadcast via YouTube: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Meetings/2012-10-30 As a special topic, I've asked David Schoonover to moderate a discussion about JS libraries beyond jQuery if there's sufficient interest. Cheers, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

2 2

What do you want to learn?
by Sumana Harihareswara 30 Oct '12

30 Oct '12

TL;DR summary: reply to tell me what you want to learn so I can get you a mentor. Longer version: Sometimes I hear that someone wants to get +2 in MediaWiki core or the ops repo, or that they hope to someday get into Google Summer of Code or deploy changes on the site ... but they don't know how. And the "how" is going to depend on you. Maybe you're a systematic learner and you thrive on a syllabus with readings. Maybe you're an more opportunistic learner and you do better with exercises. Maybe you prefer to discuss problems and ideas with a group, and maybe you thrive with the personal attention of a mentor who'll review your patches and suggest where you need to improve. I'm just speculating. Volunteers, staffers, any kind of technical contributors, please reply to this thread to give me data: what do you want to learn, and how do you learn best? Examples might be: * I want to learn enough about language engineering and mobile to help out with troubleshooting mobile apps and the mobile website in Asian languages. And I learn best by chewing on hard problems and getting help in IRC when I need it. * I want +2 in core and I want to work for the WMF someday, but people don't understand me and my patches get rejected or just sit waiting a long time, so I think I need to work on my English skills and figure out what I need to improve in my engineering approach. I need a mentor to assign me reading and writing work and CS texts to read. I will almost certainly use the responses to develop the structure of a mentorship program, and start suggesting mentor-mentee matches that will include volunteers and WMF staffers. (Unfortunately I'll probably lose internet access in the next couple days due to weather, but I'll respond when I get back online.) -- Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation

5 4

Switching to Timed Media Handler on Commons
by Rob Lanphier 29 Oct '12

29 Oct '12

Hi everyone, This is a fairly long email describing where we're at with Timed Media Handler, and what we plan for this week. The short version is: * We'll be deploying a few fixes tomorrow (Monday) * If all goes well, we'd like to deploy Timed Media Handler to Commons on Wednesday (9am PDT) * Short of deploying to Commons, we'd like to make some other significant deployment. I haven't yet run this plan by Jan (hi Jan!), so it's subject to change, but barring some unforeseen wrinkle, that's what we're rolling with. The long version: As Peter said earlier this week, the last big blocker for using Timed Media Handler (TMH) was the upgrade to Precise, which is now done (yay!) Currently on test2 for videos that where uploaded to test2 thumbnails work, e.g.: <http://test2.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Citygroup_Center,_San_Francisco.ogv> Thumbs stopped working for videos that are loaded from commons, e.g. <http://test2.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Folgers.ogv> The problem with the videos loaded from commons is that the expected thumb name starts with "Mid-", and that OggHandler on Commons doesn't support arbitrary pixel sizes in the request. Meanwhile, TMH assumes that it can request video thumbs by pixel size. Jan Gerber prepared a few fixes on Friday, and Aaron is going to deploy those on Monday. Here's all of Jan's recent commits: <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/owner:J,n,z> I *think* that will clear up the last of our issues that are known blockers for wider deployment. On Thursday, Tim, Aaron and I had a conversation on #mediawiki about CPU time for thumbnailing based on some problems: <http://bots.wmflabs.org/~wm-bot/logs/%23mediawiki/20121026.txt> One minor thing we saw was that avconv (a fork of ffmpeg supported as a replacement for ffmpeg in Ubuntu) seems to have slightly better performance than ffmpeg. Jan plans to switch over to avconv. We also noticed that it's possible to mop up a ton of CPU time creating a video if the video is long enough (and maybe with only a single keyframe at the beginning). However, Jan pointed out that TMH uses command line switches that solve this problem by seeking a couple seconds before the target frame before decoding (using the -ss parameter on the input), and then decoding a couple seconds of video to get a good snapshot. Here's the command line: avconv -ss X -i video.ogv -ss Y -vframes 1 -an -f mjpeg out.jpg with X=Y-2 This provides a bit of a buffer so that we can be reasonably sure that avconv pulls in a keyframe, or at least has a chance to pull together a good snapshot based on several other frames. Assuming we get the last blocking bugs fixed tomorrow, then we should be able to go onto Commons on Wednesday, so that's our current plan. Let us know if there are issues with this. Thanks! Rob

3 2

Welcome, Brad Jorsch!
by Rob Lanphier 29 Oct '12

29 Oct '12

Hi everyone, I'm delighted to announce that Brad Jorsch starts at the Wikimedia Foundation today as a Software Engineer in Platform Engineering, working in the MediaWiki Core group. You might already know Brad as "Anomie", the username by which he's contributed to Wikimedia sites for many years. He's written useful bots ("AnomieBot"), templates, and user scripts on English Wikipedia, reported lots of bugs, and contributed to MediaWiki core, including the parser and the API. His first task is to improve the robustness of the beta cluster, working with Antoine Musso and Chris McMahon. But you'll probably also see him exercising his front-end skills as a code reviewer for JavaScript and CSS changes. Brad grew up in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, then went to college at Northwestern University, getting his bachelor's degree in Computer Science there. After graduating, he moved to Burlington, North Carolina where he is today (he'll be working remotely) Welcome, Brad! Rob

3 2

Improving Documentation on Handling Bug Reports
by Andre Klapper 29 Oct '12

29 Oct '12

Hi everybody, at last weekend's Hackathon I investigated how to get into bug management/triaging in Wikimedia. I'd like to propose some changes in order to streamline, harmonize and centralize documentation in order to make it easier to get involved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29#Improv… Feedback, comments, criticism on this draft are very welcome. andre -- Andre Klapper (maemo.org bugmaster & GNOME Bugsquad) http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/

8 10

Jump to page:

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

Wikitech-l October 2012