Wikitech-l May 2013

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

158 participants
196 discussions

Major take-away from architecture meeting at Hackathon: RFCs will be reviewed by architecture group by Wikimania
by Mark A. Hershberger 26 May '13

26 May '13

For those of you not at the hackathon, there is one very major result from the meeting that I wanted to publicize. (There are other action items which I'll let other people expand but this one seems most important to me.) If I misunderstood or mis-state something, Robla and others can correct me. Our RFC process has been broken till now. WMF's architecture group has just committed to review and respond to all RFCs by WikiMania. This will probably involve clarifying the process that RFCs are reviewed and providing better documentation for architectural and design direction. I expect there will be more coming out of this meeting, but I wanted to post this note so I would remember to ask Brion about the RFCs he has reviewed next Friday. Mark. -- http://hexmode.com/ Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. -- G.K. Chesterson

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Architecture guidelines and RFCs
by Rob Lanphier 26 May '13

26 May '13

Hi folks, Many of us met at the Amsterdam Hackathon to discuss architecture guidelines (almost everyone with +2 in MediaWiki core, plus other knowledgeable people), and generally about the need to have more substantive conversations about MediaWiki architecture. It was a really productive discussion, and had a number of outcomes: 1. RFC review: we agreed that RFCs need more diligent review. Brion and Tim are planning to pull together the architects for regular discussions (weekly? TBD) to at least touch all of the outstanding RFCs, with the goal of clearing the current backlog of RFCs. If y'all don't see substantial movement on this in a couple of weeks, please point this out. 2. RFC use: right now, RFCs aren't used in many cases where they should be. Assuming we get into a good flow with RFCs, we can then reasonably expect people to actually write them when they're making significant changes to the MediaWiki architecture. 3. Architecture guidelines: we now have a rough beginning draft of architecture guidelines[2] we plan to use as guiding principles for RFC review. This is a document that we plan to discuss on wiki in c2 wiki style[3]. Please participate! This is a living document, which will be referenced in RFCs and responses to RFCs. We will use this mailing list to discuss the more contentious issues and generally ensure we continue to move forward refining this document. 4. A general agreement that we need to make sure that we have similar conversations at every substantial gathering of +2 developers. For example, we plan to figure something out for Wikimania. We have raw notes from both days of meetings, available here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Hackathon_2013/Architectural_princ… Rob [1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_guidelines [3] "c2 wiki style" is with inline comments similar to the c2 Design Patterns wiki: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DesignPatterns

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Finding redirects in file namespace on Commons via API?
by Daniel Mietchen 25 May '13

25 May '13

Hi, to improve duplicate detection for the Open Access Media Importer, we would like to include redirects in the file namespace, but they do not come up in searches like https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=search&srnamespac… . For example, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Animal-behavior-pone.0008793.s004.ogv redirects to http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_group_of_50_Drosophila_melanogaste… . Thanks for any pointers. Cheers, Daniel

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pt.wp Mentorship Program
by Alchimista 25 May '13

25 May '13

On pt.wikipedia there is a lack of local tech people who can do simple things like fixing a .js gadget (or creating one for a specific and local utility), or a simple bot script, and when it comes to lua modules, it's easy to guess... After a discussion, we've decided to implement our own local version of wmf mentorship programs like LevelUp, but instead of competing with them, complement where we can.[0] It basically intents to fill the gap between those who would like to know some js to deal with gadjets or lua to create nice modules, or even python to write some basic bots, and then those who wish to go further, they'll always have global programs. We'll basically start slowly on Python, we've created some doc, mostly to introduce and inform where to find the info, both on web or on mw. We're trying not to replicate information, just stick to fill the blanks, and mapping the disperse info (Gil and Sumana had gave a lot of good advices, by the way). So now that we're trying to get it to work, is there any similar program on other wm project to share experiences, or specially for those who had been mentors on global projects, any suggestion or advice? As far as i know, none of us have participated on a similar project, so we're accepting free ( a(s|nd) free bee r) suggestions :D Now, a second question. We're starting on python, more precisely python + pywpbot, and i was wondering what would be the most appropriated place where this scripts could be tested. It could be on pt.wp, but people can be afraid of breack something, at least when i cooked my first py script, i only got confident once i got the bot flag on test, could test it on a few pages there. Could http://test.wikipedia.org/ this purpose, or is there any other place where they wount feel the "elephant in a *porcelain store" syndrome? (This is a common Portuguese *saying, i believe you got the message) Cheers, -- Alchimista http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilizador:Alchimista PS. once more, thanks to Sumana and Gil for the long talk and advices. [0] - http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Desenvolvimento_t%C3%A9cnico

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Information on MW and Redis?
by Jamie Thingelstad 25 May '13

25 May '13

Hello all, I keep seeing references in WMF documents to using Redis for session storage and as the storage for the job queue going forward. However, LocalSettings doesn't have any references to Redis. It looks like the session changes for Redis were in 1.20, and I thought that the change for the job queue to be backed by Redis was coming in 1.21. It also seems that Notifications (Echo) may require Redis, but that's not real clear. I'm wondering what the general status of this is? As a 3rd party mediawiki admin, I'm eager to get redis going primarily for the job queue improvements, but with nothing noted in local settings documentation I'm wondering what the plan is for these redis based features? Will $wgMainCacheType be getting a CACHE_REDIS option? Jamie Thingelstad jamie(a)thingelstad.com mobile: 612-810-3699 find me on AIM Twitter Facebook LinkedIn

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database encoding for field with mathematical expressions
by physik＠physikerwelt.de 24 May '13

24 May '13

Hi, I'm a testing a new rendering option for the <math /> element and had problems to store MathML elements in the database field math_mathml which is of type text. The MathML elements contain a wide range of Unicode characters like the INVISIBLE TIMES that is encoded as 0xE2 0x81 0xA2 in UTF-8 or even 4 byte chars like MATHEMATICAL BOLD CAPITAL A 0xF0 0x9D 0x90 0x80 . In some rar cases I had problem to retrieve the stored value correctly from MySQL. To fix that problem I'm now using the PHP functions utf8_encode /decode to which is not a very intuitive solution. Do you know a better method to solve this issue without to change the database layout. Best Physikerwelt

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Hackathon idea: How about a live bug triage and code review hour ?
by Derk-Jan Hartman 24 May '13

24 May '13

I was thinking about the past hackathons and I realized that the interaction with eachother is often the best way to learn during these events, it's so much quicker than using gerrit/bugzilla/email/IRC. I also remember that a lot of the time, we do a lot of informal review and assessment of problems during these events. This time we have a very nice "How to get your code deployed on Wikimedia" workshop. Perhaps in addition to that, it might be a nice idea to do a live "office hour" dedicated to bug assessment and code review ? People could submit bug reports and gerrit changesets (etherpad?) and then we pick one hour, where a group of us simply try to help people with these issues in any form. We'd have multiple disciplines and areas of expertise being able to chip in, which should be great for the attendees with "why does no one pay attention to my bugreport/patch"-issues. Does anyone else think something like that might be a nice idea ? We'd need to find a timeslot though, that's probably gonna be the hardest part. I'm guessing that many WMF folks will have quite a few meetings again. DJ

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Recursive merging enabled for Gerrit repositories
by Chad 24 May '13

24 May '13

Hi, We've enabled JGit's recursive merger for all repositories using content merge strategies (basically any not using fast forwarding, which is most). The intention is to lower the number of trivial conflicts that people are having to resolve locally. This is considered experimental by Gerrit, but is now the default for JGit itself, so I believe it's stable enough for us to use. That being said, it's still new-ish so there's always a chance we'll hit some bug. So, if you see anything, ANYTHING related to merge problems then I'd like to know about it so we can either get it fixed or turn the feature back off (if it's patently broken). Thanks! -Chad

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Publish-staying-in-editmode feature for WikiEditor
by vitalif＠yourcmc.ru 24 May '13

24 May '13

Hello! I have implemented an idea for WikiEditor extension: replace "step-by-step publish" feature with another one - "publish staying in edit mode via AJAX". You can see a demo at http://wiki.4intra.net/ if you want. It works simply by sending an API save article request while NOT closing the article being edited. Also it handles section edits correctly via re-requesting section content after editing, so you'll stay with consistent edit form even if you add sections. The idea is to give authors the ability to save intermediate results. My question is - does anyone really need "step-by-step publishing" feature that is in WikiEditor? I think it's useless because it just duplicates the existing functionality, just submits the form using normal POST request, and makes editing harder as you have to do more clicks. I would submit a patch to Gerrit if you're interested in replacing it with "publish-staying-in-editmode". -- With best regards, Vitaliy Filippov

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Need help with a Jenkins PHPUnit build failure
by Arthur Richards 24 May '13

24 May '13

In trying to submit https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/63907/18, I get a Jenkins build failure due to PHPUnit failing, due to a Fatal being thrown: https://integration.wikimedia.org/ci/job/mwext-MobileFrontend-testextension… The fatal: PHP Fatal error: Class 'MFMockRevision' not found in /srv/ssd/jenkins/workspace/mwext-MobileFrontend-testextensions-master/extensions/MobileFrontend/tests/MobileContextTest.php on line 500 The thing is, 'MFMockRevision' should be made available by it's file being included in efExtMobileFrontendUnitTests() (our hook handler for UnitTestsList. Unit tests execute fine for me and at least one other person on the mobile team. I do not want to manually merge that patchset since I imagine it would cause build failures on subsequent patchset +2's. Anyone know what might be going on? -- Arthur Richards Software Engineer, Mobile [[User:Awjrichards]] IRC: awjr +1-415-839-6885 x6687

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Wikitech-l May 2013