Wikitech-l February 2020

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

54 participants
65 discussions

Upcoming Search Platform Office Hours—March 4th, 2020
by Trey Jones 03 Mar '20

03 Mar '20

Hi everyone, The Search Platform Team <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Search_Platform> usually holds office hours the first Wednesday of each month. Come talk to us about anything related to Wikimedia search! Feel free to add your items to the Etherpad Agenda for the next meeting. Details for our next meeting: Date: Wednesday, March 4th, 2020 Time: 16:00-17:00 GMT / 08:00-09:00 PST / 11:00-12:00 EST / 17:00-18:00 CET Etherpad: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Search_Platform_Office_Hours Google Meet link: https://meet.google.com/vyc-jvgq-dww Join by phone in the US: +1 786-701-6904 PIN: 262 122 849# Hope to talk to you in a week! —Trey Trey Jones Sr. Software Engineer, Search Platform Wikimedia Foundation UTC-5 / EST

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MediaWiki API pageview issue
by James Gardner 02 Mar '20

02 Mar '20

Hi all, We are a group of undergraduates working on a project using the MediaWiki API. While working on this project, we ran into a unique issue involving pageviews. When trying to pull pageview data for a particular page, the redirects of a page would not be counted along with the original pageviews. For example, the Hong Kong protests page only has direct views, and not views from previous titles. We attempted to use the wmflabs.org tool, but it only shows data from a certain date. (Example link: https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-… <https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-…> ) Then we attempted to use the redirects of a page and using the old page ids to grab the pageview data, but there was no data returned. When we attempted to grab data for a page that we knew would have a long past, but the parameter of "pvipcontinue" did not appear ( https://www.mediawiki.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=query%2Bpageviews). (Example: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox#action=query&format=json&… ) In the end, we are trying to get an accurate count of view for a certain page no matter the source. Any guidance or assistance is greatly appreciated. Thanks, Jackie, James, Junyi, Kirby

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[GlobalBlocking] Review wanted
by Martin Urbanec 29 Feb '20

29 Feb '20

Hi, could someone review https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/568420/ please? Thank you! Martin

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OOUI v0.37.0 released -- OOjs update, mobile form layout improvements
by Volker E. 29 Feb '20

29 Feb '20

Hi, we've released v0.37.0 of OOUI this Wednesday. It will rollout on the normal train next Tuesday. Highlights in this release: - Underlying library OOjs was updated to v3.0.1, up from v3.0.0, nominally a breaking change. - Text flow of form layouts on mobile devices was improved, surfaced in Advanced Mobile Contributions - Additionally this release removed deprecated icons 'beaker' and 'unTrash', both were renamed, former to 'labFlask', latter to 'restore'. Additionally 'toc' in 'icons-layout' was deprecated in this release, as design team has decided to use 'listBullet' as unified table of contents icon.[0] If you haven't yet updated them, now's the time. You can find details on additional new features, code-level, styling and interaction design amendments, and all improvements since v0.36.0 in the full changelog[1]. If you have any further queries or need help dealing with breaking changes, please let me know. As always, interactive demos[2] and library documentation is available on mediawiki.org[3], there is comprehensive generated code-level documentation and interactive demos and tutorials hosted on doc.wikimedia.org[4]. OOUI version: 0.37.0 MediaWiki version: 1.35.0-wmf.11 Date of deployment to production: Regular train, starting Tuesday 17 December [0] - https://doc.wikimedia.org/oojs-ui/master/demos/?page=icons [1] - https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/oojs/ui/+/v0.37.0/History.md [2] - https://doc.wikimedia.org/oojs-ui/master/demos/#widgets-mediawiki-vector-ltr [3] - https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/OOUI [4] - https://doc.wikimedia.org/oojs-ui/master/ Best, Volker

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Production Excellence (January 2020)
by Krinkle 28 Feb '20

28 Feb '20

📘 Read on Phabricator at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/post/view/180/ ------- How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out! ## 📊 Month in numbers * 3 documented incidents. [1] * 26 new Wikimedia-prod-error reports. [2] * 26 Wikimedia-prod-error reports closed. [3] * 198 currently open Wikimedia-prod-error reports in total. [4] To read more about these incidents and pending actionables; check < https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incident_documentation#2020>, or Explore Wikimedia incident stats (interactive). ------- ## 📖 Paradoxical array key Wikimedia encountered several Zend engine bugs that could corrupt a PHP program at run-time, during the upgrade from HHVM to PHP 7.2. (Some of these bugs are still being worked on.) One of the bugs we fixed last month was particularly mysterious. Investigation led by Antoine (Hashar) and Tim Starling. MediaWiki would create an array in PHP and add a key-value pair to it. We could iterate this array, and see that our key was there. Moments later, if we tried to retrieve the value from that same array, sometimes the key would no longer exist! After many ad-hoc debug logs, core dumps, and GDB sessions, the problem was tracked down to the string interning system of Zend PHP. String interning is a memory reduction technique. It means we only store one copy of a character sequence in RAM, even if the many parts of the code use the same character sequence. For example, the words “user” and “edit” are frequently used in the MediaWiki codebase. One of those sequences is the empty string (“”), which is also used a lot in our code. This is the string we found disappearing most often from our PHP arrays. This bug affected several components, including Wikibase, the wikimedia/rdbms library, and ResourceLoader. Tim used a hardware watchpoint in GDB, and traced the root cause to the Memcached client for PHP. The php-memcached client would “free” a string directly from the internal memory manager after doing some work. It did this even for “interned” strings that other parts of the program may still be depending on. Effie and Giuseppe backported the upstream fix to our php-memcached package and deployed it to production. Thanks! — https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T232613 ------- ## 📉 Outstanding reports Take a look at the workboard and look for tasks that might need your help. The workboard lists error reports, grouped by the month in which they were first observed. → https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/wikimedia-production-error/ Breakdown of recent months (past two weeks not included): * March: 3 of 10 reports left. (unchanged). ⚠️ * April: Two reports closed, 4 of 14 left. * May: (All clear!) * June: Two reports closed. 4 of 11 left. * July: Four reports closed, 8 of 18 left. * August: 4 of 14 reports left. (unchanged) * September: One report closed, 8 of 12 left. * October: 8 of 12 left (unchanged). * November: 5 of 5 left (unchanged) * December: Three reports closed, 6 of 9 left. * January: 7 new reports survived the month of January. There are a total of 57 reports filed in recent months that remain open. This is down from 62 last month. ------- ## 🎉 Thanks! Thank you to everyone who helped by reporting, investigating, or resolving problems in Wikimedia production. Thanks! Until next time, – Timo Tijhof ------- Footnotes: [1] Incidents. – https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incident_documentation#2020 [2] Tasks created. – https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/qfCVpWqGX0tJ/#R [3] Tasks closed. – https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/ndeCQjeJ6UNr/#R [4] Open tasks. – https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/47MGY8BUDvRD/#R

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Gsoc
by Nwobodo Ekene 28 Feb '20

28 Feb '20

Hi guys my name is Nwobodo Leonard a mechanical engineering student from Nigeria, I am interested in working on any python related course for this year's Google summer of code! I will appreciate all the help I can get..i am still not an advanced programmer but I am always willing to learn.

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Mediawiki hacking starter guide
by Shrinivasan T 28 Feb '20

28 Feb '20

Hello all, We are planning on a India Hackathon. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CIS-A2K/Events/India_Hackathon_2020 To bring new developers and train them, looking for a developer guide or handbook/beginners guide. Do we any such starters guide? I think the below topics would be nice to be covered on the handbook. If no such hand book, shall we create one? Will be useful ? Topics to be covered : Intro Setup User creation User types Name space Admin rights Bot access Pages create/edit/delete Category create/edit/delete Page Talk page Preference Gadget Widget Common.js Api Paws Tool server Become Ssh keys Cron Host web apps SQL dump access SQL access SQL structure Daily dump access Wikidata api Sparql Wikidata tools Pywikibot Wiki old module Phabricator Asking for help Docs Mailing list Irc Telegram groups Oauth Auth APIs Pagination in results Linking pages to wikidata Linking to other language site pages Test wiki site to play around Auto Wiki Browser Tools repo. ---------- What other topics can be added? Share your thoughts. Thanks.

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TechCom Radar 2020-02-26
by Alexandra Paskulin 27 Feb '20

27 Feb '20

Hi all, Here are the minutes from this week's TechCom meeting: * Last call for comments: Stable interface policy < https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T193613>. Last call ends on March 11, 2020 at 20:00 UTC. Review the draft at <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Stable_interface_policy>. * Discussed RFC: Re-evaluate librsvg as SVG renderer on Wikimedia wikis <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T40010> * Discussed RFC: 2019 Process amendments < https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T216308> * Discussed RFC: Adopt a modern JavaScript framework for use with MediaWiki <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T241180> * Discussed RFC: Standard method for feature-management in skins/extensions <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T242835> * No public discussion scheduled for next week 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> Best, - Alex -- Alex Paskulin Technical Writer Wikimedia Foundation

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Remove "profileoutput" debug log channel from MediaWiki core
by Krinkle 27 Feb '20

27 Feb '20

TLDR: If you use $wgDebugLogGroups['profileoutput'] in LocalSettings.php as a way to collect performance profiles from Tideways/XHProf, this will no longer receive messages in MediaWiki 1.35 and later. ------- Hi, I've been auditing the Profiler component in MediaWiki and deprecating or removing various legacy features that either don't fit the current model very well and/or that seem to be broken, unused or undocumented. [1] The objective here is to keep offering the same functionalities for developers, but in a way that's easier to use, with fewer moving parts, and lower maintenance costs for us. Today I'm writing about the "profileoutput" debug log channel. As part of the PSR-3/Monolog refactor many years ago, this feature was grandfathered into the LegacyLogger. The $wgProfiler variable controls which collector and output are used at run-time. For example, you can collect the call graph with XHProf/Tideways, and then output it to an HTML comment, or dump to a file on disk, etc. Any number of outputs can be implemented and enabled. The "profileoutput" debug log channel was effectively another way of achieving the same thing, by assigning $wgDebugLogGroups['profileoutput'] to a file path. If you're currently using this, see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T245835 for how to make this work via $wgProfiler instead. -- Timo [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T231366

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Quality and Testing Engineering Office Hour this Friday...
by Jean-Rene Branaa 27 Feb '20

27 Feb '20

Hello All, This week we will be starting a monthly Quality and Testing Engineering office hour series of meetings. The Quality and Testing Engineering office hours will generally have a theme or topic to encourage participation. This month, Željko Filipin from the Quality and Test Engineering team will be hosting a session on "Software Testing Anti-patterns". Logistics: Date - Friday February 21, 2020 Time - 17:00 UTC Meeting URL: meet.google.com/xgq-kyfk-crt <https://meet.google.com/xgq-kyfk-crt?hs=122> Cheers, JR

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Wikitech-l February 2020