TL;DR See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T136429 and try the new jessie-migration branch.
The Wikimedia Foundation has been working on converting the majority of its production server farm from Ubuntu to Debian for quite some time. In August of 2016 that project advanced to the point of actually converting the 252 servers running MediaWiki [0]. Today that work has largely been done and the vast majority of MediaWiki is running on Jessie.
Now it's time (past time really) for MediaWiki-Vagrant to catch up. We have done this sort of thing once before with the switch from using Ubuntu Precise to Ubuntu Trusty as our base image [1] in mid-2014. We had fewer users then and only one supported virtual machine type. The switch from Trusty to Jessie is also slightly more complicated because the init system used is changing as well. This means that we have more Puppet code changes to make than last time and more people who will be impacted by the change.
For a little over a month several of us have been working on the jessie-migration branch to get ready for the change over. I think we are at the point that we could change over, but I want to have a period of testing by a wider audience to see if we can iron out a few more common issues before forcing everyone to either upgrade or explicitly pin their MediaWiki-Vagrant virtual machines to the git tag for the last Trusty compatible build.
== Testing the Jessie base image and Puppet profiles ==
Its recommended to test with a fresh MediaWiki-Vagrant checkout so if things go badly you can easily switch back to your original install and keep working.
$ git clone --recursive https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/mediawiki/vagrant mwv-jessie $ cd mwv-jessie $ git checkout jessie-migration $ ./setup.sh $ vagrant up
You can run vagrant roles list -e -1 to get a nice list of the roles you have enabled on your normal Trusty VM install to copy over to your Jessie testing VM. This one-liner liner might even do it for you:
$ cd mwv-jessie $ vagrant roles enable $(cd ../vagrant; vagrant roles list -e -1) $ vagrant provision
Give things a try and report issues as children of the tracking task for this migration [2]. Barring major issues effecting many people, I would like to merge the jessie-migration branch with the master branch the week of March 13th.
[0]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T143536 [1]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/rMWVAdc73e2bee9dff1e0755d15cfe1376ee2dc6e1... [2]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T136429
Bryan