This is the weekly TechCom board review in preparation of our meeting on Wednesday. If there are additional topics for TechCom to review, please let us know by replying to this email. However, please keep discussion about individual RFCs to the Phabricator tickets.

Activity since Monday 2020-11-02 on the following boards:

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/techcom/
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/techcom-rfc/

Committee inbox:

• T268328: Automatically index extensions in Codesearch
• Daniel is raising that people effectively use Codesearch to guide deprecation efforts under theStable Interface policy. As such, we should define what inclusion criteria it has (or should have), and simply or document how to implement that in practice through adding and removing repositories from its index (esp those not hosted by Wikimedia).
• T267085: Clarify deprecation of method overrides
• A question about the stable interface policy.

Committee board activity:

• T175745: Do not overwrite edits when conflicting with self
• Some renewed interest on this question about how MW should handle when e.g. someone starts editing the same page from multiple tabs and then submits those edits.
• T227776: General ParserCache service class
• Addshore asking for an update.

New RFCs:

• T268326: RFC: Amendment to the Stable interface policy (Nov 2020)
• Proposal by Daniel, to:
• … fill some gaps (e.g. traits, and member fields).
• … allow for removal without (released) deprecation if it is unused in code we know about and is considered "maintained". Input welcome.
  

Phase progression:

• T266866 RFC: Bump Basic browser support to require TLS 1.2 for MediaWiki core
• Ed lists which Web APIs and other browser capabilities would become safe to use in the base layer (HTML/CSS), as well as some JS features that will automatically become available to Grade A.
• Ed confirmed TLS 1.2 mapping to browser names/versions.
  
• Moved to Phase 3: Explore.
• T260330 RFC: PHP microservice for containerized shell
• Moved to Last Call last week, until 2 December (next week).
• Tim answered and added a section to clarify the backwards compatible nature of the PHP interface in core, for third-parties that would not or have not installed Shellbox.
• T259771: RFC: Drop support for database upgrade older than two LTS
• Last week's concerns about detection and failure prevention have been answered by Amir.
• The Platform Engineering Team has filled the ownership gap for this policy.
• Moved to Phase 4: Tune.

IRC meeting request:

• Later today (Wed 25 Nov), this RFC will be discussed in #wikimedia-office on Freenode IRC:
  RFC: Provide mechanism for configuration sets for development and tests
  https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T267928

Other RFC activity:

• T263841 RFC: Expand API title generator to support other generated data
• Rescoped from potential software change to policy update.
• Awaiting resourcing from core API steward to confirm support, risk, compatibility as proposed.
• T250406 RFC: Hybrid extension management
• Conversation about what we would need to commit to for WMF software, and seeking placing and approval of said resourcing.
• T119173: RFC: Discourage use of MySQL ENUM type
• Next step is for the consensus to be turned into concrete wording for the policy.
• T40010: RFC: Re-evaluate librsvg as SVG renderer for WMF wikis
• Some general clarifications, and statistics from production.

-- Timo