A few of us have been discussing how awesome it would be to use
MediaWiki-Vagrant[1] to create a portable production-like environment. This would give Mediawiki engineers a common ground from which to develop
core
code and/or extensions, and by coming close to mimicking Wikimedia's production environment, would hopefully reduce the amount of friction around getting features out to production. Also, this is something that
we
would be able to pre-package this for new engineers - imagine handing a new MediaWiki engineer a USB stick with an up-to-date MediaWiki-Vagrant instance that closely mimics production at say, a future hackathon.
We started chatting about what it would take to get us there, and identified some initial steps that we'd like to tackle at the Zürich Hackathon - namely, turning a few puppetized production services into roles that we could use in MediaWiki-Vagrant.
We've created a corresponding 'topic' on the Hackathon's topic page[2]
to
describe what we'd like to achieve at the Hackathon. Please review, comment, and certainly add yourself as an 'interested person' if this catches your fancy and you plan to attend the hackathon.
I am keeping my options open for the hackathon but wanted to support this effort enthusiastically. And to mention that the analytics team loves mediawiki-vagrant and tries to get most of its projects integrated with it as roles.
One thing I'd be interested in is to hear how Linux folks are installing vagrant / virtualbox. I've not been able to "vagrant up" my mediawiki-vagrant since I upgraded to Ubuntu 13.10 and I've heard of at least two other people with the same experience. Maybe 14.04 will just solve all that, but it's worth looking into so we can post any gotchas in the install instructions.