On Sat, Apr 7, 2012 at 12:28 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo)
<nemowiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Now that 1.19 deploy has been completed, it seems a
good idea to discuss
about our test wikis.
I see the following problems:
* No inventory of test wikis exist. There are many and they don't follow any
pattern or rule of sort (see appendix).
* It's unclear what purpose those wikis have, in particular: if they're
permanent, or going to be deleted; if used only by developers or also open
to generic testing by users or even as sandboxes/playgrounds ("let's see how
sysop tools are"); when and how it's possible to request one (example real
use case: "test the translation of FlaggedRevs to Finnish before deploy on
fi.wiki").
* As a result, valuable content and activities are either misplaced and not
performed effectively (or at all), or lost forever in the end.
An example of the latter, which seems the worst problem:
https://www.mediawiki.org/?oldid=499749#Feature_requests references a
feedback page that got deleted in the meanwhile. The future of
<http://labs.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Problem_reports> is unclear and
the page overlaps with other wikis' purposes, in particular it should be on
a permanent wiki and moved to
mediawiki.org if only meant for
developers/technical users or to
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Problem_reports> if it has the Wikimedia
projects' users as audience.
I think that we should work on some sort of general policy for test wikis
(very simple) to divide them in categories, avoid fragmentation and ensure
we empower people to do all they need. The permanent test wikis at least
should be easily discoverable from a central place (I've heard of a
Wikimedia Labs automatical home page with index, but we need to focus on
what's most urgent).
In the meanwhile, it doesn't harm if each of us adds the (current or past)
test wikis they remembers to this section I created:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_wikis#Test_wikis
Nemo
== Appendix ==
Examples of wikis follow (far from comprehensive):
* Main ones are
https://test.wikipedia.org ,
https://test2.wikipedia.org
These wikis are in the production cluster. They are meant as a final
test before code is fully launched in production. These wikis are as
close to production as possible.
test.wikipedia.org runs from NFS and
is pre-deployment.
test2.wikipedia.org is deployed in a similar way to
the rest of the cluster.
* Now we have
http://labs.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/
and all the related
wikis in the form
http://af.wiktionary.beta.wmflabs.org but they're not
accessible from anywhere, nor explained clearly, nor have an index or any
navigation tool.
** Used to be
deployment.wmflabs.org
Well, no. It used to be
labs.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org and is now
deployment.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org. Labs was a confusing name. Labs
is the infrastructure supporting beta. Beta is meant to be a clone of
production that hosts wikis in a similar manner. It's meant to be an
environment close to production that can be used pre-production
(meaning before it hits test or test2).
** The situation will get worse with subdomains not
following any clear rule
like
http://education.wmflabs.org
So, we're looking at models for handling stuff like this...
Education is a project that isn't ready for production. It's in
initial development. It needs to be demo'd publicly though. Because of
that, we give it a public IP address and a domain name.
Just because it's in labs doesn't mean it's about to go into
production. Labs is meant to prototype a *lot* of experimental things.
When extensions get closer to being production ready, the current
concept is that it'll move into beta to test functionality in a more
production like environment.
All of these are going away. <something>.labs.wikimedia.org have
already been closed. I'd *love* to delete them permanently, but we
have no reasonable means of doing so in the production cluster.
All of the prototypes are going to go away soon. Beta is the
replacement for prototype.
- Ryan