Hi all,
tomorrow, Thursday May 25th, I will be upgrading our HHVM servers to
use a recent version of the ICU[1] library, a long-needed change that
we are finally ready to perform: it allows us to stop maintaining an
older version by ourselves, including having to patch it for any
security issue.
For details about the rationale and the long process involved, see
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T86096
While the upgrade should be smooth, the ICU maintainers do not
guarantee backward compatibility for collation, so to be sure that is
addressed, we will need to run a maintenance script on all wikis that
have $wgCategoryCollation set to anything including with 'uca', see
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/OMWC/browse/master/wmf-config/I…
Since this script takes quite a long time to run[2], there will be
some user-facing effect, during the transition period, namely, citing
what MatmaRex says on the ticket:
"After ICU is upgraded, but before the updateCollation script
finishes, articles newly added to categories may appear out-of-order
on category listing pages. The headings on them might be wrong in
funny ways, too. Nothing else should be affected."
If no last-minute showstopper blocks the process, I will be starting
the procedure around 8:00 UTC, and log in the SAL[3] every step of the
process. Don't hesitate to contact me on IRC (#wikimedia-operations on
freenode, user _joe_) if you see some strange behaviour.
Thanks in advance for your patience
Giuseppe
[1] ICU stands for International Components for Unicode
[2] It is actually much, much faster to run now than it ever was,
thanks to the amaizing work others have done to improve it, see
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T58041 and
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T130692
[3]
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Server_Admin_Log
--
Giuseppe Lavagetto, Ph.d.
Senior Technical Operations Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation