Hi All,
Here are the minutes from this week's TechCom meeting (and sorry for the delay):
* RFC approved after last call: Heredoc arguments for templates (aka "hygienic"
or "long" arguments). Implementation will probably have to wait until Parsoid
has been ported to PHP, so we don't have to implement it three times.
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T99268>
* RFC approved after last call: Abstract schemas and schema changes. This allows
database updates to be written in a form agnostic to the underlying RDBMS, using
the DBAL library. We will be dropping support for Oracle and MSSQL for core to
make this feasible. The maintainers of the Oracle and MSSQL backends have
expressed interested in adding support back as extensions.
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T191231>
* RFC approved after last call: Create a proper command-line runner for
MediaWiki maintenance tasks. Implementation is pending priorization by the Core
Platform Team. <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T99268>.
* RFC under discussion: Set explicit PHP support target for MediaWiki.
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T228342>
* The TechCom meeting on August 14 will be a public meeting held as a session at
the Wikimania Hackathon, at 15:00 Sweden time (6am in California).
* There is no RFC discussion scheduled, and no last calls ongoing.
You can also find our meeting minutes at
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Committee/Minutes>
See also the TechCom RFC board
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/mediawiki-rfcs/>.
If you prefer you can subscribe to our newsletter here
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Newsletter:TechCom_Radar>
Cheers,
Daniel
Hi Everyone,
We're looking for speakers who are interested in presenting at the monthly
Tech Talks series <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Talks>
!
Tech talks are a great opportunity for you to share information with the
wider Wikimedia community about technical topics and projects you are
working on. Giving a tech talk is a great way to develop your presentation
skills, while sharing your valuable technical knowledge with others.
Content can range from deep dives into very technical topics for very
technical audiences to helping nontechnical audiences understand a concept
or project your team is working on. You can browse upcoming and past
technical talks
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Talks#Upcoming_Wikimedia…>
for ideas and inspiration. Tech talks are typically broadcast live and
recorded for future viewing. Time, date, and format are flexible.
Tech talks can be scheduled up to six months in advance. If you are
interested, you can submit a proposal for a talk through Phabricator
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/edit/form/1/?title=Tech%20…>,
and the organizers will contact you with more information.
Kindly,
Sarah R. Rodlund
Technical Writer, Developer Advocacy
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Developer_Advocacy>
srodlund(a)wikimedia.org
tl;dr: If your team doesn't do any development on GitHub then this email
likely doesn't affect you.
As you may or may not know there is now a read-only replica of Gerrit
available at https://gerrit-replica.wikimedia.org/ (hooray); however,
over the weekend we noticed some missing tags from that mirror (boo).
To fix the missing tags for the replica I forced replication to run for
all repos in Gerrit today as part of a configuration restart. After a
replication sync I was able to ensure that all repos on the new replica
were now up-to-date; however, it also closed all the pull requests that
were made via pushing branches to wikimedia-org GitHub repos (which is
the work flow of several apps teams and possibly others).
Apologies for the inconvenience and thanks to Dmitry Brant and Joe
Walsh for pinging me about the problem.
I've since removed GitHub as a "mirror" -- meaning Gerrit will not
delete branches there. Paladox has filed a task upstream to allow us to
specify a full replication for a particular remote (i.e., gerrit-replica
but not GitHub) instead of all remotes[0], and for added suspenders for
our belt I've made a patch set that should exclude these projects from
replicating to from Gerrit to GitHub in the future[1].
I think all of the fallout of this change is taken care of (judging from
my GitHub search):
<https://github.com/search?p=1&q=org%3Awikimedia+is%3Aunmerged+type%3Apr+upd…>
But if your project was affected, please either reach out to me or add
your project to the GitHub exclusion list in Puppet like in my
patchset[1] and add me as a reviewer.
Thanks and sorry
-- Tyler
[0]. <https://bugs.chromium.org/p/gerrit/issues/detail?id=11280>
[1]. <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/operations/puppet/+/528276>
Friends,
As part of an investigation into category aliasing (think “theater
directors” vs. “theater directors"), we’ve identified two potential
technical implementations and I’m hoping to get feedback to help us choose
between the proposals, or change course entirely.
For a summary of the problem and solutions, please see
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Gendered_Categories
and join the talk page if you wish.
Some questions on my mind are:
* Will the proposed hard-redirect category behavior break any MediaWiki or
third-party software assumptions about hard redirects or categories?
* Is “non-page” category aliasing really the mountain of tech debt I
imagine it to be?
* Have there been other attempts to solve this problem?
Kind regards,
Adam
from the Technical Wishes Team at Wikimedia Germany
Hello!
I noticed that the mobile browser compatibility matrix[0] is a little
dated (last revised March 2017). I don't know how we formally decide to
update it so I'd like to propose the following version bumps given the
last year's metrics cited on wiki[1-2]:
- iOS: modern 8 -> 11; basic 7 -> 9
- Android: modern 4 -> 6; basic: 2 -> 4
- Windows: basic 8 -> (remove OS column)
- Blackberry: basic * -> (remove OS column--it's unclear if star means
all or none)
Additionally, I propose the following changes:
- Replace "Basic" terminology in the OS table with "Basic (Grade C)"
for clarity
- Drop "unknown" rows from OS and browser tables as there is no unknown
column for OS or browser, which is inconsistent, and they're also
unused
Some of these changes are a little bolder than usual but would help
focus development, design, testing configuration, and the conversation
towards the future. I sincerely apologize if I've offended anyone.
Stephen
[0] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Compatibility#Mobile
[1]
https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#mobile-site-by-os/os-f…
[2] https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#mobile-site-by-os
Hello,
On most wikis, MediaWiki is configuration to convert the first letter of a
title to uppercase, but apparently it's not converting every Unicode
characters : for example, on frwiki ɽ
<https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%C9%BD&redirect=no> is a
different article than Ɽ <https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E2%B1%A4>, even if
the second character is the uppercase version of the first one in Unicode.
So, what characters are actually converted to uppercase by the title
normalization ?
I need to know this information to stop reporting some false positives in
WPCleaner <https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:WPCleaner>.
Thanks, Nico
