Wikitech-l June 2021

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

46 participants
40 discussions

Developer Portal content draft: A future central place which links key technical documents
by Andre Klapper 01 Jul '21

01 Jul '21

<tl;dr>: Your feedback is wanted on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_Advocacy/Developer_Portal/Content_… Hi everyone, last year[1] the Developer Advocacy team started to work on a single, central entry point for developers and tech-minded people for Wikimedia's technical documentation[2]. A central entry point ("developer portal") would cover common technical use cases to allow existing and future technical contributors and developers to find the information they need. Each use case links to its most relevant documentation (i.e. to pages on wikitech or mediawiki.org). This is part of a larger initiative to implement an organization strategy for key technical documents: Understand challenges about finding and maintaining docs, identify key docs, and investigate ways to improve our workflows around documentation. So far we: * Researched and reviewed existing documentation venues and pages * Reviewed developer/documentation portals in the broader industry * Interviewed several engineering teams around technical documentation workflows, audiences, and key technical docs (the key themes from these conversations are available, see the link above) * Created an initial draft for the structure and content of the single entry point Now we would like to improve this initial content draft with your help. 1) Please take a look at the initial draft at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_Advocacy/Developer_Portal/Content_… 2) Then, please help improve it by sharing your thoughts and feedback until *May 25th* at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_Advocacy/Developer_Portal/Content_… Note that this is only a draft how to structure content. It is not a design or layout proposal and it is not an implementation. For additional future work, see also the Phabricator workboard[3]. Next steps include: * A session at the remote Hackathon (May 22-23; [4]) * Incorporate content improvements, based on your feedback * Check the documents linked from the single entry point proposal for accuracy * Investigate requirements for the technical implementation * Investigate improvements of processes around technical documentation (structure, locations, navigation, stewardship, etc). If you want to learn more about the project, please see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_Advocacy/Developer_Portal Thanks to everybody who has provided their valuable input to get to this stage, and thanks in advance to everyone who will! Cheers, andre [1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2020-August/093773.html [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_Advocacy/Developer_Portal [3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/wikimedia-developer-portal/ [4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Hackathon_2021 -- Andre Klapper (he/him) | Bugwrangler / Developer Advocate https://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/

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Update on DC switchover
by Kunal Mehta 30 Jun '21

30 Jun '21

Hi, Today we switched over most services and traffic caches from the eqiad (Virginia) datacenter to codfw (Texas) as part of improving our reliability. The goal is to have this procedure working and regularly tested in case of an emergency when we actually need it. We're only aware of one user-facing impact, for a short time WDQS lag detection was broken, affecting Wikidata bots that check it. This is tracked as <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T285710>. Users will experience a bit of a latency increase for now as most user traffic will need to talk to both eqiad and codfw datacenters. This will go away tomorrow once MediaWiki is switched over (keep reading). Also, we were a bit delayed in starting today because of an issue causing appservers to get stuck: <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T285634>. == Services == Started at 14:29 UTC, officially finished at 15:09. The main issues we ran into were: * the helm-charts service is unique and doesn't have a service IP, causing the automatic switchover verification to break. This required us to manually check the other services that come after it in the list, and then re-run cookbook while excluding it. Tracked as <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T285707>. * the restbase-async service has some special handling, which we debated on whether to follow that or not, opted to not special case it. Figuring out what to do long-term is <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T285711>. * the WDQS issue mentioned earlier. == Traffic == Started at 15:43, finished at 15:45. It took until ~16:25 for eqiad to mostly depool. There's not much else to report, it went very smoothly. == Tomorrow's MediaWiki switchover == Scheduled for 14:00 UTC <https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1624888854>. It is our goal to minimize the read-only time and make this a non-event from a user perspective. All of the coordination will take place in the #wikimedia-operations IRC channel on Libera Chat You're more than welcome to follow along but if you have questions, please ask them in #wikimedia-tech so it doesn't get disruptive. The procedure that we'll be following is documented at <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Switch_Datacenter#MediaWiki>. I'm planning to do one more "live test" later today, will announce that on IRC when it gets started. -- Kunal

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Extending the SelectQueryBuilder
by Ostrzyciel 29 Jun '21

29 Jun '21

Hi, The SelectQueryBuilder class was introduced a year ago <https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org/…> and it's seen some adoption, mostly in core. I've also noticed that there are two classes that extend it in core, the PageSelectQueryBuilder and UserSelectQueryBuilder. I really like how this approach allows for better separation of DB code from the rest, which has always been a complete and utter mess in MW. I would like to do something similar in an extension, but the base class is currently not explicitly marked as stable to extend and thus, according to the stable interface policy <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Stable_interface_policy#Stable_to_extend>, the interface could be broken at any time. My question is – are there any plans to make the class stable to extend? Is there a rough roadmap for its development? If the class is unstable to extend for some reason – what are the expected changes to come? Thanks! -- Ostrzyciel

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Changes to storage of files metadata
by Amir Sarabadani 26 Jun '21

26 Jun '21

Hello, If you don't do anything with metadata fields of file tables (image table for example) in replicas, you can ignore this email. "image" table in Wikimedia Commons is extremely big (more than 380GB compressed) and has been causing multiple major issues (including an incident recently). Deep inspections revealed that more than 80% of this table is metadata of PDF files, around 10% is metadata of DjVu files and the 10% left is the rest of the information. This clearly needs fixing. The work has been done on this by Tim Starling and we are slowly rolling out two major changes: First, format of metadata in the database (for example img_metadata field in image table) will change for all files. It used to be php serialization but it will be changed to json. You can see an example of before and after in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T275268#7178983 Keep it in mind that for some time this will be a hybrid mode that some files will have it in json format and some will have it in php serialization. You need to support both formats for a while if you parse this value. Second, some parts of metadata for PDF and later DjVu files won't be accessible in Wikimedia Cloud anymore. Since these data will be moved to External Storage and ES is not accessible to the outside. It's mostly OCR text of PDF files. You can still access them using API (action=query&prop=imageinfo). Nothing to the outside users will change, the API will return the same result, the user interface will show the same thing but it would make all of Wikimedia Commons more reliable and faster to access (by indirect changes such as improving InnoDB buffer pool efficiency), improves time to take database backups, enables us to make bigger changes on image table and improve its schema and much more. I hope no one heavily relies on the img_metadata field in the cloud replicas but if you do, please let me know and reach out for help. You can keep track of the work in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T275268 Thank you for understanding and sorry for any inconvenience. -- Amir (he/him)

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Breaking changes to CentralIdLookup core class
by Petr Pchelko 25 Jun '21

25 Jun '21

Hello, Platform Engineering Team is going to make breaking changes to the MediaWiki core CentralIdLookup class [1] We are changing the accepted types for the $user parameter from User to UserIdentity. This should not affect any callers, but any class that extends CentralIdLookup will be broken. The only extensions known to us that implement CentralIdLookup are CentralAuth and Wikibase, and we are updating them alongside with the core class. If you maintain an extension which implements a custom CentralIdProvider, please respond to this email and we will either help you update your extension, or work out a new plan for converting the core class. Additionally, we are loosening the return type guarantees for CentralIdLookup::localUserFromCentralId from User to UserIdentity. This could potentially affect the callers, but we’ve updated all extensions to be compatible with the new guarantees. If you maintain an extension that is not available on codesearch[2] please reach out to us. Best regards. Petr. Staff Software Engineer. Platform Engineering Team. WMF 1. https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/core/+/700991 <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/core/+/700991> 2. https://codesearch.wmcloud.org/extensions/?q=localUserFromCentralId&i=nope&… <https://codesearch.wmcloud.org/extensions/?q=localUserFromCentralId&i=nope&…>

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Thank you Tuesday
by Amir Sarabadani 24 Jun '21

24 Jun '21

Hi, Lots of people thanked me for deploying mailman3 but I want to mention that it would have not been possible without Wikimedia Cloud Services team giving a lot of resources to me so I could have a test setup and puppetize mailman3 easily which in turn made deployment to production much easier. Thank you for providing such a critical infrastructure to us! Keep up the great work. Best

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How to get alerts on errors for cron jobs on toolforge
by Shrinivasan T 23 Jun '21

23 Jun '21

Hello all, I have a bot at toolforge, running weekly once in cron job using "jsub" Followed the below link for the setup. https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Toolforge/Pywikibot Getting the JOBNAME.out and JOBNAME.err files at the home folder. Is there any other way like email notification to get alerts, if some error happens? I think the files JOBNAME.out and JOBNAME.err will be keep on growing on the bason host login.toolforge.org How to avoid this? Thanks. -- Regards, T.Shrinivasan My Life with GNU/Linux : http://goinggnu.wordpress.com Free E-Magazine on Free Open Source Software in Tamil : http://kaniyam.com Get Free Tamil Ebooks for Android, iOS, Kindle, Computer : http://FreeTamilEbooks.com

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Security and maintenance release: 1.31.15 / 1.35.3 / 1.36.1
by Sam Reed 23 Jun '21

23 Jun '21

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Security pre-release announcement: 1.31.15 / 1.35.3 / 1.36.1
by Sam Reed 22 Jun '21

22 Jun '21

Hi all, Tomorrow we will be issuing a security and maintenance release to all supported branches of MediaWiki. The new releases will be: - 1.31.15 - 1.35.3 - 1.36.1 This will resolve 1 minor issue in MediaWiki core and also includes some fixes previously committed to git, including minor security and hardening patches along with bug fixes included for maintenance reasons. We will make the fixes available in these respective release branches, and also master. Tarballs will be available for the above mentioned point releases as well. A summary of some of the security fixes that have gone into non-bundled MediaWiki extensions will also follow. As a reminder, 1.31 (the old LTS) was due to become end of life (EOL) in June 2021. 1.35 (the new LTS) is supported until September 2023. However, to try and meet our LTS-LTS overlap commitments (1.35 was late due to COVID), 1.31 will get best-efforts extra support until the end of September 2021. Practically, this will mean 1.31 is only tested on PHP 7.2, removing the burden of testing on PHP 7.0 and 7.1 which both became EOL in 2019. This will also mean 1.31 is eligible for one final security release in late September 2021 before formally becoming EOL. [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Version_lifecycle

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Production Excellence #32: May 2021
by Krinkle 21 Jun '21

21 Jun '21

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out! Read on Phabricator at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/post/view/236/ Incidents Zero incidents recorded in the past month. Yay! That's only five months after November 2020, the last month without documented incidents (Incident stats <https://codepen.io/Krinkle/full/wbYMZK>). Remember to review Preventive measures <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/4758/> in Phabricator, which are action items filed after an incident. ------- Trends In May, we unfortunately saw a repeat of the worrying pattern we saw in April <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/post/view/235/production_excellence…>, but with higher numbers. We found 54 new errors. This is the most new errors in a single month, since the Excellence monthly began three years ago in 2018. About half of these (29 of 54) remain unresolved as of writing, two weeks into the following month. Figure 1, Figure 2: Unresolved error reports stacked by month. <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/post/view/236/production_excellence…> Month-over-month plots based on spreadsheet data <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTrUCAI10hIroYDU-i5_8s7pony…> . ------- New errors in May Below is a snapshot of just the 54 new issues <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/tmkGqt0C93YG/#R> found last month, listed by their code steward <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developers/Maintainers>. Be mindful that the reporting of errors is not itself a negative point per-se. I think it should be celebrated when teams have good telemetry, detect their issues early, and address them within their development cycle. It might be more worrisome when teams lack telemetry or time to find such issues, or can't keep up with the pace at which issues are found. Anti Harassment Tools None. Community Tech None. Editing Team +2, -1 Cite (T283755 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T283755>); OOUI (T282176 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T282176>). Growth Team +17, -4 Add-Link (T281960 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T281960>); GrowthExperiments (T281525 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T281525> T281703 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T281703> T283546 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T283546> T283638 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T283638> T283924 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T283924>); Echo (T282446 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T282446>); Recent-changes (T282047 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T282047> T282726 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T282726>); StructuredDiscussions (T281521 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T281521> T281523 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T281523> T281782 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T281782> T281784 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T281784> T282069 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T282069> T282146 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T282146> T282599 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T282599> T282605 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T282605>). Language Team +1 Translate extension (T283828 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T283828>). Parsing Team +1 Parsoid (T281932 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T281932> ). Reading Web None. Structured Data None. Product Infra Team +1 WikimediaEvents (T282580 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T282580>). Analytics None. Performance Team None. Platform Engineering +16, -11 MediaWiki-API (T282122 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T282122>); MediaWiki-General (T282173 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T282173>); MediaWiki-Page-derived-data ( T281714 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T281714> T281802 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T281802> T282180 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T282180> T283282 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T283282>), MediaWiki-Revision-backend ( T282145 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T282145> T282723 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T282723> T282825 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T282825> T283170 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T283170>); MediaWiki-User-management ( T283167 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T283167>); MW Expedition (T281526 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T281526> T281981 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T281981> T282038 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T282038> T282181 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T282181> T283196 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T283196>). Search Platform +3, -2 CirrusSearch (T282036 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T282036> T282207 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T282207>); GeoData (T282735 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T282735>). WMDE TechWish +2, -1 Revision-Slider (T282067 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T282067>); VisualEditor Template dialog ( T283511 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T283511>). WMDE Wikidata +3, -1 Wikibase (T282534 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T282534> T283198 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T283198> T283862 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T283862>). No owner +7, -6 CentralAuth (T282834 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T282834> T283635 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T283635>); Change-tagging (T283098 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T283098> T283099 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T283099>); MapSources (T282833 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T282833>); MediaWiki-Page-information ( T283751 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T283751>); Other (T283252 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T283252>). ------- Outstanding errors Take a look at the workboard and look for tasks that could use your help. → https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/wikimedia-production-error/ Summary over recent months: Aug 2019 (0 of 14 left) ✅ Last task resolved! -1 Jan 2020 (1 of 7 left) ⚠️ Unchanged (over one year old). Mar 2020 (2 of 2 left) ⚠️ Unchanged (over one year old). Apr 2020 (4 of 14 left) ⬇️ One task resolved. -1 May 2020 (5 of 14 left) ⚠️ Unchanged (over one year old). Jun 2020 (5 of 14 left) ⚠️ Unchanged (over one year old). Jul 2020 (4 of 24 issues) ⏸ — Aug 2020 (12 of 53 issues) ⬇️ One task resolved. -1 Sep 2020 (7 of 33 issues) ⏸ — Oct 2020 (19 of 69 issues) ⬇️ One task resolved. -1 Nov 2020 (8 of 38 issues) ⬇️ One task resolved. -1 Dec 2020 (7 of 33 issues) ⏸ — Jan 2021 (3 of 50 issues <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/WIP9W8q54HB6/#R>) ⏸ — Feb 2021 (7 of 20 issues <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/5MzPJAb5oJgv/#R>) ⬇️ One task resolved. -1 Mar 2021 (14 of 48 issues <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/RsVPep46KRY4/#R>) ⬇️ Four tasks resolved. -4 Apr 2021 (23 of 42 issues <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/rYyMt_gYYymb/#R>) ⬇️ Two tasks resolved. -2 *May 2021* (29 of 54 issues <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/tmkGqt0C93YG/#R>) 54 new issues found, of which 29 remain open. +54; -25 ------- Tally 133 issues open, as of Excellence #31 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/post/view/235/production_excellence…> (12 May 2021). -12 issues closed, of the previous 133 open issues. +29 new issues that survived May 2021. 150 issues open, as of today (12 June 2021). ------- Thanks! Thank you to everyone who helped by reporting, investigating, or resolving problems in Wikimedia production. Thanks! Until next time, – Timo Tijhof

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Wikitech-l June 2021