The developers of MediaWiki, the software Wikimedia sites run on, are wrapping up work on a new version, with hundreds of improvements and bugfixes. Description:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.19
There is a draft schedule for deploying this software to all Wikimedia sites in February and March. The schedule is tentative and dates are going to shift and change. (See the "SCHEDULING" note below in this email.)
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.19/Roadmap
We want to do a lot of testing BEFORE the rollout, so that we catch potential problems before they affect readers and editors. Please help us! We have set up replicas of your wikis and installed the latest MediaWiki code on those replicas, so you can spot new problems in the software's behavior:
http://labs.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org
Please look at http://labs.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:SiteMatrix and find wikis to test. Try reading, editing, and so on as you normally would; treat it as a giant sandbox. If you find a problem, please report it here: http://labs.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Problem_reports
We are especially interested in finding out about problems that affect unique JavaScript user scripts or Gadgets, so we can help you fix them.
SCHEDULING: Now is also a good time to let us know if there are going to be big news days or weeks in February where your community would be especially unhappy if you had a window with no access or no editability. For example, if there's an important national election happening in one of the countries you serve, we'd ideally like to avoid taking your site down for maintenance on that day. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:MediaWiki_1.19/Roadmap would be a good place to tell us that.
If you have questions, please feel free to contact us in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_on_IRC or via the Wikimedia developers' mailing list at https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l .
Thank you.
On 26 January 2012 16:59, Sumana Harihareswara sumanah@wikimedia.orgwrote:
The developers of MediaWiki, the software Wikimedia sites run on, are wrapping up work on a new version, with hundreds of improvements and bugfixes. Description:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.19
There is a draft schedule for deploying this software to all Wikimedia sites in February and March. The schedule is tentative and dates are going to shift and change. (See the "SCHEDULING" note below in this email.)
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.19/Roadmap
We want to do a lot of testing BEFORE the rollout, so that we catch potential problems before they affect readers and editors. Please help us! We have set up replicas of your wikis and installed the latest MediaWiki code on those replicas, so you can spot new problems in the software's behavior:
http://labs.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org
Please look at http://labs.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:SiteMatrix and find wikis to test. Try reading, editing, and so on as you normally would; treat it as a giant sandbox. If you find a problem, please report it here: http://labs.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Problem_reports
We are especially interested in finding out about problems that affect unique JavaScript user scripts or Gadgets, so we can help you fix them.
SCHEDULING: Now is also a good time to let us know if there are going to be big news days or weeks in February where your community would be especially unhappy if you had a window with no access or no editability. For example, if there's an important national election happening in one of the countries you serve, we'd ideally like to avoid taking your site down for maintenance on that day. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:MediaWiki_1.19/Roadmap would be a good place to tell us that.
If you have questions, please feel free to contact us in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_on_IRC or via the Wikimedia developers' mailing list at https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l .
Thank you.
-- Sumana Harihareswara Volunteer Development Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
If you need any user rights (admin, crat..) for your testing, please feel free to request on http://labs.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Global_Requests#Permissions - I can provide rights as needed (as can the other users on http://labs.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:GlobalUsers/steward although they might be a bit more busy with testing), so feel free to ping me on IRC (Thehelpfulone), email me or leave a message on my enwiki/metawiki talk page if nobody has replied to your request.
Thanks.
On 26/01/12 18:26, Thehelpfulone wrote:
If you need any user rights (admin, crat..) for your testing, please feel free to request on http://labs.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Global_Requests#Permissions - I can provide rights as needed (as can the other users on http://labs.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:GlobalUsers/steward although they might be a bit more busy with testing), so feel free to ping me on IRC (Thehelpfulone), email me or leave a message on my enwiki/metawiki talk page if nobody has replied to your request.
Thanks.
Actually, just asking in #wikimedia-labs, there's an high probability that someone with appropiate permissions will be there.
Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
SCHEDULING: Now is also a good time to let us know if there are going to be big news days or weeks in February where your community would be especially unhappy if you had a window with no access or no editability. For example, if there's an important national election happening in one of the countries you serve, we'd ideally like to avoid taking your site down for maintenance on that day. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:MediaWiki_1.19/Roadmap would be a good place to tell us that.
What's this about "taking your site down for maintenance"? I don't think Wikimedia wikis have needed to go into read-only mode or go offline(!) for an upgrade since like MediaWiki 1.5 or something. I skimmed https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.19 and didn't see any crazy database schema changes or anything. Am I missing something?
MZMcBride
On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 4:31 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
What's this about "taking your site down for maintenance"? I don't think Wikimedia wikis have needed to go into read-only mode or go offline(!) for an upgrade since like MediaWiki 1.5 or something. I skimmed https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.19 and didn't see any crazy database schema changes or anything. Am I missing something?
Not that I can see, there's no major schema changes this go round so I can't see any reason we'd need to go offline/readonly.
-Chad
On 01/26/2012 04:45 PM, Chad wrote:
On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 4:31 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
What's this about "taking your site down for maintenance"? I don't think Wikimedia wikis have needed to go into read-only mode or go offline(!) for an upgrade since like MediaWiki 1.5 or something. I skimmed https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.19 and didn't see any crazy database schema changes or anything. Am I missing something?
Not that I can see, there's no major schema changes this go round so I can't see any reason we'd need to go offline/readonly.
-Chad
OK. I was under the impression that we announce these windows partly because if something goes very wrong during the upgrade, sites might go offline or readonly. Is that wrong or inapplicable here? Perhaps better wording would instead just talk about possible JS breakage or some other, more likely ill effects? Let me know and I'll send a followup mail.
On 26 January 2012 21:53, Sumana Harihareswara sumanah@wikimedia.orgwrote:
On 01/26/2012 04:45 PM, Chad wrote:
On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 4:31 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
What's this about "taking your site down for maintenance"? I don't think Wikimedia wikis have needed to go into read-only mode or go offline(!)
for
an upgrade since like MediaWiki 1.5 or something. I skimmed https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.19 and didn't see any
crazy
database schema changes or anything. Am I missing something?
Not that I can see, there's no major schema changes this go round so I can't see any reason we'd need to go offline/readonly.
-Chad
OK. I was under the impression that we announce these windows partly because if something goes very wrong during the upgrade, sites might go offline or readonly. Is that wrong or inapplicable here? Perhaps better wording would instead just talk about possible JS breakage or some other, more likely ill effects? Let me know and I'll send a followup mail.
The risk of a new software bug sending a wiki offline is about the same
during a version update as for any other individual update: more changes are being pushed, but more testing has been done on them. Breakages can almost always be remedied by rolling back the deployment, especially now we have the het-deploy framework in good working order, and the more serious the breakage, the faster it will be noticed. Updates leaving the sites readable but readonly are pretty implausible, and a breakage leaving a site offline for a substantial period of time pretty unlikely. I'd say scheduling around 250 sets of national events against such remote eventualities is substantial overkill.
--HM
It's quite unlikely, but if some people would be affected (eg. you are presenting wikipedia the day it's getting updated, and end up showing lots of css failures and server errors in the screen), and the devs don't care about the actual date. Why not ask?
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org