Wikitech-l August 2021

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

39 participants
46 discussions

Goto for microoptimisation
by Tim Starling 14 Aug '21

14 Aug '21

For performance sensitive tight loops, such as parsing and HTML construction, to get the best performance it's necessary to think about what PHP is doing on an opcode by opcode basis. Certain flow control patterns cannot be implemented efficiently in PHP without using "goto". The current example in Gerrit 708880 <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/core/+/708880/5/includes/Html.ph…> comes down to: if ( $x == 1 ) { action1(); } else { action_not_1(); } if ( $x == 2 ) { action2(); } else { action_not_2(); } If $x==1 is true, we know that the $x==2 comparison is unnecessary and is a waste of a couple of VM operations. It's not feasible to just duplicate the actions, they are not as simple as portrayed here and splitting them out to a separate function would incur a function call overhead exceeding the proposed benefit. I am proposing if ( $x == 1 ) { action1(); goto not_2; // avoid unnecessary comparison $x == 2 } else { action_not_1(); } if ( $x == 2 ) { action2(); } else { not_2: action_not_2(); } I'm familiar with the cultivated distaste for goto. Some people are just parotting the textbook or their preferred authority, and others are scarred by experience with other languages such as old BASIC dialects. But I don't think either rationale really holds up to scrutiny. I think goto is often easier to read than workarounds for the lack of goto. For example, maybe you could do the current example with break: do { do { if ( $x === 1 ) { action1(); break; } else { action_not_1(); } if ( $x === 2 ) { action2(); break 2; } } while ( false ); action_not_2(); } while ( false ); But I don't think that's an improvement for readability. You can certainly use goto in a way that makes things unreadable, but that goes for a lot of things. I am requesting that goto be considered acceptable for micro-optimisation. When performance is not a concern, abstractions can be introduced which restructure the code so that it flows in a more conventional way. I understand that you might do a double-take when you see "goto" in a function. Unfamiliarity slows down comprehension. That's why I'm suggesting that it only be used when there is a performance justification. -- Tim Starling

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🚂🌈 Summary of 1.37.0-wmf.17 train deployment
by Mukunda Modell 13 Aug '21

13 Aug '21

This email is a belated summary of the Wikimedia production deployment of 1.37.0-wmf.17. Dan Duvall was the train conductor last week. I was the backup conductor. Blocker task: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T281158 The new version is live on all sites: https://versions.toolforge.org/ 🎶 Optional: For optimal enjoyment, queue up a fine track by They Might Be Giants <https://s3.amazonaws.com/TMBG_pod/TMBGPodcast57a.mp3> for your listening pleasure while you dive into these stats: == 📊 Stats == * 287 patches ↓ * 16 backports <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/source/mediawiki/compare/?head=wmf%2F1.37…> * 1 rollback (for ~3hours) ↑ * 0 days of delay * 5 blockers added, 3 resolved, 2 removed ↑ ** RESOLVED: *** T287988 PHP Warning: Class __PHP_Incomplete_Class has no unserializer <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T287988> *** T288191 substituting {{#tag:ref}} tags and templates; and pipe tricks fail in Page namespace <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T288191> *** T288288 1.37.0-wmf.17 deployment moved footer from bottom of the page to left column in Monobook <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T288288> == 🚂🌈 == 1 task was mentioned, which is not a train blocker but remains open: * T287410 ResourceLoaderSkinModule: Skins should not use the legacy styling feature <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T287410> Thank you to everyone who helped out whether in a big way or a small one. Special thanks goes to the owners of these phabricator usernames: * dduvall * Jdlrobson * Jdforrester-WMF * Ladsgroup * Urbanecm * DannyS712 * Krinkle * Legoktm * Tpt * Xover * jouncebot * Jdforrester-WMF Yes I know James is mentioned twice. There really aren't enough thank-yous for all that James does. – The Trainbow Bunch

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Get ready for the Wikimania Hackathon 2021!
by Srishti Sethi 13 Aug '21

13 Aug '21

Hello everyone, We hope that you are ready and are excited for the upcoming 24hrs Wikimania Hackathon :) This will be a virtual space for you to experiment, work on technical projects, and have discussions with fellow Wikimedians! *Day and hours* Hackathon will start at 5:00 am UTC on August 13th, Friday (the first day of Wikimania), and run until August 14th, Saturday, 4:59 am UTC. You are welcome to continue hacking on other days of Wikimania. There will be a final showcase on the last day, August 17th, with more information coming soon on the social channels. *Activities* An open schedule is up on the Hackathon's subpage on the Wikimania wiki: < https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2021:Hackathon/Schedule> [1]. There are still some free slots, and you are welcome to reserve one for a session. We will be using two virtual hacking rooms powered by Jitsi; links to join are on the schedule page. For projects and a complete list of activities, check out the Phabricator workboard: < https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/5402/> [2] *Newcomer activities* For those of you who are a newcomer to the event or Wikmedia’s technical ecosystem, we have put together three Q&A sessions and a list of resources for you to get started. *Networking* See a list of who is attending, topics they are interested in, and how you can contact them: < https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2021:Hackathon/Participants> [3]. Please add yourself to this list, and also see a complete list of social channels and read about the code of conduct for Wikimedia's technical spaces that will be in effect in all these channels: < https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2021:Hackathon#Social_channels> [4]. If you have any questions, ask on the Hackathon's talk page: < https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2021_talk:Hackathon> [5]. We look forward to meeting you in less than a day :) Cheers, Srishti On behalf of the Wikimania Hackathon organizing team [1] https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2021:Hackathon/Schedule [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/5402/ [3] https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2021:Hackathon/Participants [4] https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2021:Hackathon#Social_channels [5] https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2021_talk:Hackathon *Srishti Sethi* Senior Developer Advocate Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>

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Phabricator database master maintenance - Thursday 12th August
by Manuel Arostegui 12 Aug '21

12 Aug '21

Hello, On Thursday 12th August at 06:00 AM UTC we'll switch our phabricator database master to a different host ( https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T288197) There'll be 1 or 2 minutes of read-only time. Writes will be blocked, reads will continue as usual. Sorry for the inconveniences. Manuel.

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Support for Automating Source Code Documentation
by Felipe Ebert 09 Aug '21

09 Aug '21

Hi, I am currently working on designing a bot to support open-source software development: the idea is that the bot can analyze code review comments, detect those related to explaining the reasons behind the implementation choices and suggest these reasons as source code comments. As the first step of this design process we would like to ask developers involved in code reviews to answer a survey (we expect it to take not more than 25 minutes): https://forms.office.com/r/9nD4HtNbTK Thanks in advance, -- Felipe Ebert Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

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Gadget AjQuickDelete
by Dhaval S. Vyas 08 Aug '21

08 Aug '21

Hi, I had imported gadget AJQuickDelete from commons to gu.wiki a few years back, which worked perfectly well until I updated it last month. Not it has disappeared from the navigation bar. Can someone please help me by looking in to it? Thanks, Dhaval

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Phasing out old jQuery versions
by Amir Sarabadani 07 Aug '21

07 Aug '21

Hi, (If you don't use jQuery in your code or gadgets, you can ignore this email) in 2017 jQuery 3 got deployed to production and a backward compatibility layer was introduced to prevent old codes from breaking. Since then it has been emitting warnings in your console. All start with "JQMIGRATE". Some of these old jquery breaking changes have been deprecated in versions released in 2006 or 2007. We are slowly pulling the plug and removing that compatibility layer (which would reduce the default payload and make Wikipedia faster for everyone). Yesterday, that layer was removed from mediawiki CI, tests in gated extensions have passed but there is a chance that your extension might be broken in CI now if it's not part of gated extensions. In that case, please fix the errors. We will move forward to deploy this in Wikimedia wikis soon meaning really old gadgets will also break if they don't fix their code. Please check your console and if you see jquery migration deprecation warnings, attend to them because they will break soon. Firefox doesn't give trace to warnings anymore but in Chrome (and using ?debug=1) you can easily find the source of deprecation warnings. We already fixed many usages in code and gadgets and we will make sure to fix heavily used gadgets and user scripts but we can't possibly fix everything and it's the maintainers' responsibility to fix deprecation warnings that is being emitted for years. Another aspect is that if you use jquery.ui, this library has been deprecated as well and I recommend moving away from it but if you still use it and migration can be hard, we patched our jquery.ui fork to make sure it doesn't break. Still, if you find a part of jquery.ui that has not been fixed, let me know. You can track the work in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T280944 and the metrics of deprecations can be found in https://grafana.wikimedia.org/d/000000037/mw-js-deprecate?orgId=1&refresh=1… Thank you and sorry for the inconvenience. -- Amir (he/him)

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GitLab: Implementation & migration status update
by Brennen Bearnes 07 Aug '21

07 Aug '21

tl;dr: https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/ exists now and individuals can host projects there; at the team level we're moving some RelEng projects over and will be in touch with early adopters soon; you can find a roadmap for this work at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/GitLab/Roadmap - read on for more details. ---- Hi all, It's been a while since my last update on WMF's implementation of GitLab, so here's another one. When I last wrote, we were hoping to have a minimum-viable installation of GitLab by the end of June. That mostly worked out. gitlab.wikimedia.org is now live, and seeing (limited) real usage. So can you use it? Yes, with caveats. * Once T288162 - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T288162 - is resolved in the near future, everyone with a Wikimedia developer account should be able to sign in. Until then, use is limited to members of the WMF, WMDE, and NDA groups. * No shared CI job runners are provided yet * No teams just yet, only individual projects, getting ACL right is hard :) * Your data will not be obliterated from here forward, *probably* * We have backups even! Can teams use it? Soon! RelEng is porting a few projects over, and then we'll get in touch with teams on the early adopter list. Things we're thinking about: * Shared CI runners: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T287279 * ACL groups and membership: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T282842 * Early adopters: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T282842 The WMF has also hired two full-time serviceops folks with a GitLab focus. Lastly, I'll note that we have a roadmap for this work, with rough timelines, here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/GitLab/Roadmap As ever, you can follow work on this project on Phabricator: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/board/5057/ Feel free to reach out with any questions via mail, Phabricator, or #wikimedia-releng on Libera Chat IRC. -- Brennen Bearnes Release Engineering Wikimedia Foundation

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Gerrit upgrade August 3rd 16:00 UTC
by Ahmon Dancy 05 Aug '21

05 Aug '21

Hello, We will upgrade our Gerrit to [version 3.3]. We have scheduled it on Tuesday, August 3rd at 16:00 UTC. We will first upgrade the [Gerrit replica] then the primary server. The service will thus be unavailable for a few minutes while we conduct the operation and restart the service. The July 19th upgrade took a bit longer than expected since we were trying our runbook for the first time. We have since improved our documentation and addressed a few configuration glitches we had. This upgrade comes with a new feature: "Attention Set". It replaces change *assignees* with a list of people that are expected to act on the change. It helps better differentiate changes you have already reviewed from the one you have to review or amend. The feature is nicely explained on upstream documentation page: http://gerrit-documentation.storage.googleapis.com/Documentation/3.3.1/user… Ahmon, Antoine, Brennen Release Engineering [version 3.3] https://www.gerritcodereview.com/3.3.html [Gerrit replica] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gerrit-replica.wikimedia.org Upgrade task: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T262241

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05 Aug '21

Hello all, We invite you all to sign up for Toolhub's Quality Signal sessions! Toolhub <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolhub> [1] is a community-authored catalog of Wikimedia tools. On Toolhub, you will be able to discover new tools in the Wikimedia ecosystem, promote their use in your wiki community, and help improve them by contributing data. Toolhub's first release is planned around Wikimania 2021. The Toolhub team is currently working on identifying quality indicators through conversations with tool users and developers. As a tool user, how do you know which tool is reliable, useful, and safe to use? As a tool maintainer, what makes it attractive to you to contribute to an existing tool? What information are you looking for to decide whether to join a tool project? We hope that these sessions will help gather quality indicators for tools and provide valuable insight toward developing new features to convey the quality. Want to organize a quality signal session in your community in August/early September? Please get in touch on the talk page or sign-up for an already planned session by adding your name below it: < https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolhub/The_Quality_Signal_Sessions> [2]. Your feedback, thoughts, ideas would be valuable! If you are attending Wikimania, we are running a few introductions and a feedback session as part of the unconference. Learn more here: < https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2021:Unconference/Toolhub> [3]. Cheers, Srishti On behalf of the Toolhub team [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolhub [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolhub/The_Quality_Signal_Sessions [3] https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2021:Unconference/Toolhub *Srishti Sethi* Senior Developer Advocate Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>

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Wikitech-l August 2021