Wikitech-l July 2014

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

144 participants
150 discussions

Mantle - coding sharing between Flow and MobileFrontend
by Jon Robson 04 Jul '14

04 Jul '14

== The problem == MediaWiki has a huge UI standardisation problem. We use different libraries, different css styles and class names, some of which do the same thing. Recently the teams working on Flow and MobileFrontend noticed they were doing various things in a similar fashion. We were both using client side templates, we had various bits of JavaScript that were similar, and many styles that we could potentially be sharing. == The motivation == The Flow team has recently decided to use Handlebars [1] templating language and the mobile team has been heavily using Hogan [2] templating language for over a year now. Both of us are actively involved in the templating RFC [3] however neither of us want to be blocked by that RFC. Despite these different templating language choices and the knowledge that we will one day need to standardise on just one templating language, we both had a need to pass templates from the server to the client via ResourceLoader. Mobile has been doing this for a year, and rather than another big project like Flow reinventing the wheel, we decided it was time to share code. We attempted to put the code straight into core, but Krinkle quite rightly pointed out that a templating RL language solution without a templating language packaged with it would be confusing and not useful to the majority of developers outside the Flow/mobile bubble. So instead, Mantle [4] was born. == Mantle == The purpose of Mantle is to wrap additional infrastructure code that core is missing, and iterate on that code quickly to get it to a state where it is as generic as possible. As a result of Flow and mobile's collaboration the template code from mobile supports multiple languages which is great for 3rd party users who might want to write code using a different template language) and it now has eyes from both the mobile and Flow teams on it, so it should become stronger now it has 2 use cases. We're hoping to add support for Knockoff which Gabriel has been working on in the near future to experiment with that. We are waiting on a standard template language before upstreaming this code to core and going through another round of review amongst our developer peers. Currently Flow depends on Mantle, and there is a patch in gerrit to move MobileFrontend to using it [5] == The future == Mantle is only a short term measure. The hope is that all the code that goes here will eventually go into core. We hold the code here to exactly the same high standards that we hold core to, we are just able to more freely experiment and iterate. I hope Mantle doesn't exist in a year and instead we have a healthy frontend architecture that Mantle has helped grow. In the meantime however mobile and Flow will use it to at least standardise on a few things between our codebases with the goal to make Flow as mobile friendly as possible. We don't want to ship two bits of code, one from MobileFrontend and one from Flow, to a mobile Flow page that do exactly the same thing. I also hope overtime it could be used to share other aspects of missing frontend code architecture across extensions. For example, it could potentially be used to rapidly develop new components for MediaWiki UI [6] that are not quite stable enough to be placed in core and made available to all. If you're interested in sharing and collaborating on frontend code with Flow and mobile feel, or client side templates in general free to grab me off list and on irc (@jdlrobson). We don't do enough of this :-) Jon [1] http://handlebarsjs.com/ [2] http://twitter.github.io/hogan.js/ [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/HTML_templating_library [4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Mantle [5] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/129335 [6] https://git.wikimedia.org/tree/mediawiki%2Fcore.git/49f86a90520e6618c1e3044…

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Speak at SeaGL in Seattle in October?
by Sumana Harihareswara 04 Jul '14

04 Jul '14

SeaGL is a ~250-person open stuff conference in Seattle. They'd love talks by Wikimedians about tech and culture topics -- security, community, devops, getting-started, tales of woe, etc. Submit an idea by July 15th - and Deb Nicholson (see fwd) is totally happy to bounce ideas around with you and help you with your proposal. http://seagl.org/schedule/2013.html has last year's schedule. Wikimedians are eligible to get travel/hotel subsidies to give talks at SeaGL: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:TPS Sumana Harihareswara Senior Technical Writer Wikimedia Foundation ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Deb Nicholson <deb(a)eximiousproductions.com> Date: Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 3:54 PM Subject: Seattle event this fall, CFP open now To: Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah(a)wikimedia.org> Hi Sumana, I'm helping to organize the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference this year. We are particularly interested in having some fresh voices at SeaGL. I was wondering if you would help me reach out to Wikipedians who might be interested in speaking by forwarding the CFP info? When: October 24 & 25 Who: The audience will be a mix of ~250 professionals, hobbyists and students. Where: The conference takes place in central Seattle -- a walkable neighborhood with great food and coffee that is easy to get to on public transportation. Other cool news: Our keynote is Karen Sandler, a longtime free software lawyer/activist/powerhouse. Call for Participation: http://seagl.org/news/2014/06/20/CFP-Open.html I'm happy to offer feedback on new-to-speaking people's proposals if that helps them get over the hump. Thanks for your help! Cheers, Deb

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MediaWiki-Vagrant is going Trusty
by Ori Livneh 04 Jul '14

04 Jul '14

I'm writing to communicate an upcoming major change in MediaWiki-Vagrant. In the coming week, I'm going to upgrade the base image from Precise Pangolin to Trusty Tahr, the latest version from Canonical. Trusty integrates many new open-source software components, many of them specifically targeting cloud and virtual environments. You can read more about the release in the release announcement and the release notes: http://fridge.ubuntu.com/2014/04/17/ubuntu-14-04-trusty-tahr-released/ https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TrustyTahr/ReleaseNotes This change to MediaWiki-Vagrant anticipates a migration of Wikimedia's application server stack from Precise to Trusty, the groundwork for which is already well underway. (Wikimedia's TechOps team, substantially assisted by volunteer contributors, has completed a migration to Puppet 3, and has made a Trusty image available on Labs). I hope to keep the migration painless so as to not disrupt the work of those of you who use this stack as your primary development environment. The fact that a similar migration process is underway for Wikimedia's production infrastructure will, I hope, foster increased collaboration across Wikimedia and the broader developer community.

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RfC review this week: Associated namespaces
by Sumana Harihareswara 04 Jul '14

04 Jul '14

Micru's Associated namespaces RfC is up for discussion this week. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_meetings/RFC_review_2014-04-23 (We also have room for 1 more RfC to discuss.) Micru said about https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Associated_namespaces : > The intended outcome would be: > 1) find out if there is any objection against the "Namespace registry and > association handlers" that Mark proposed > 2) discuss possible problems with this approach > 3) see if there would be any hands available to work on it; it is a > delicate topic that might need someone with a deep understanding of MediaWiki Micru also noted that we've had a previous suggestion for a namespace manager https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Namespace_manager . > AFIK, it never materialized because back then there was not such a great > need as there is now - or at least the current use cases didn't exist back > then. > I hope this RFC moves forward because it affects important upcoming and > already deployed projects (Commons migration, templates, Visual editor, WD, > etc). Come to #wikimedia-office at 2100 UTC this Wednesday http://www.worldtimebuddy.com/?qm=1&lid=2950159,2147714,5391959,100&h=29501… or reply/comment with your comments/suggestions. 2300 Berlin 5pm New York 2pm California 7am Sydney -- Sumana Harihareswara Senior Technical Writer Wikimedia Foundation

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2300 UTC Monday: grid system discussion
by Sumana Harihareswara 04 Jul '14

04 Jul '14

Later today, at 2300 UTC, we'll be in #wikimedia-office discussing Pau Giner's grid system RfC. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Grid_system "to simplify the creation of user interfaces and make them ready for multiple screen sizes." Check out the new patchset https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/133683/ "It makes the log-in form responsive (adjusting layout, typography and visibility to the current screen size). It does not leverage all the potential of responsive design, but may be useful as a demo to help the reviewers." This is at a time meant to make it easier for Australia and China to participate. http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?hour=23&min=00&sec=0&d… Sydney: Tuesday 9am Beijing: Tuesday 7am San Francisco: Monday 4pm I'm sorry for the late announcement of this one; for the next several weeks I'll be haranguing authors to help me get discussions set up a few weeks in advance. :) More: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_meetings/RFC_review_2014-06-02 Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation

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Roadmap and deployment highlights - week of July 7th
by Greg Grossmeier 02 Jul '14

02 Jul '14

Hello and welcome to the latest edition of the WMF Engineering Roadmap and Deployment update. This a special "early in the week" edition, so there might be more changes to the below plan than normal. The full log of planned deployments next week can be found at: <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments#Week_of_July_7th> A quick list of notable items... == Monday == * The mobile team will be submitting iOS app to AppStore ** There's an unknown review timeline from Apple * CirrusSearch ** CirrusSearch will be turned on as primary on Commons == Tuesday == * MediaWiki deploy ** group1 to 1.24wmf11: All non-Wikipedia sites (Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikiversity, and a few other sites) ** <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.24/wmf12> *** This will include the "Support | as a magic word" patch and thus ride the train *** see: <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#q,136234,n,z> == Wednesday == * CentralAuth GlobalRenameUser ** The new GlobalRenameUser tool will be enabled and usable. * CirrusSearch ** CirrusSearch will be turned on as primary on Spanish Wikipedia == Thursday == * MediaWiki deploy ** group2 to 1.24wmf12 (all Wikipedias) ** group0 to 1.24wmf13 (test/test2/testwikidata/mediawiki) 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 |

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HTML templating decision soon?
by Sumana Harihareswara 02 Jul '14

02 Jul '14

Hi everyone, We've been talking about the HTML templating RFC since the Architecture Summit in January. And in the Mobile quarterly review the other day, they said - see https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AMobile_Web_%26_App_Q… - that they would love a decision soon. So it seems like we ought to figure it out so it can get off the RfC docket. :-) https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/HTML_templating_library https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/HTML_templating_library… I think this is what's up: Many developers like the work that Matt and Gabriel have been doing on Knockoff, but we're currently lacking all of the pieces necessary to make a final call. Some folks were testing it out and need to report back to the list with their verdicts. In the meantime, some developers (such as the Mobile and Flow teams) have short-term needs that can't wait up for Knockoff to become a complete solution, and so are working out interim standardizations outside of this mailing list so that they can move forward while Knockoff work continues. (Not sure what all of them are.) Is this about right? Should I be saying Knockoff or Knockout? Can I put the RfC decision meeting on the calendar for next week? :-) Sumana Harihareswara Senior Technical Writer Wikimedia Foundation

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Special:Search returning errors on English Wikipedia
by Pine W 02 Jul '14

02 Jul '14

I am unable to search using any of the options on https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search This came to my attention when a user reported that they were unable to search English Wikipedia's help files. It turns out that none of the "advanced", "everything", "multimedia", or "content pages" search functions are working. All searches return the error "An error has occurred while searching: The search backend returned an error:" Pine

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Discontinue internet explorer 6 and 7 support
by Thomas Mulhall 02 Jul '14

02 Jul '14

Hi could we discontinue support for internet explorer 6 and 7 because jquery ui 1.11.0 drops support for internet explorer 6 and 7. Windows xp support internet explorer 8. and so I think we can discontinue support for internet exporer 6 and 7.

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Old page versions and historical templates
by Adam Wight 01 Jul '14

01 Jul '14

Hi, Fundraising would like the ability to snapshot or retrieve a CentralNotice banner exactly as it was rendered at an earlier time, including the old revisions of templates, which is tricky and AFAICT not supported by MediaWiki-core. I know this issue has come up before but it looks like development is external and has died out. The most relevant code seems to be Extension:BackwardsTimeTravel, which adds some expensive-looking hook callbacks, and Extension:Memento, which is too far into the future and amends how HTTP operates. If ours is an unsupported usage, we'll have to implement a horrible kludge such as taking a recursive snapshot of all transcluded pages. Thanks, Adam

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Wikitech-l July 2014