This past Monday I held a bug triage meeting here in the office. I haven't gotten around to publishing the summary until now because of busy-ness and procrastination.

However, we ended the bug triage with a meta-discussion about Bug Triages and how to make them better. Before I summarize this past triage, here are a couple of things that we plan to do.

* IRC bug triages

We really want more community involvement. Since our community is so spread out, Erik suggested we try to use IRC to hold the triage.

So, this coming Monday, I'll post a list of bugs that we'll be covering and remind you that on Tuesday at 1700UTC I will be holding a bug triage in #wikimedia-dev on IRC. Please join us, but you may be asked to actually FIX some bugs if you have commit access. ;)

For some that is simply too late or too early, don't worry, I plan to alternate times so that the next week it will be done 6 hours later at 2300UTC.

If you're like me and you can't instantly compute time zone differences for different parts of the world, try this link: http://hexm.de/3w

* Narrower Triages

When I first started doing the triages, I said I would pick a theme. However, I haven't kept that up. In addition to making our triage process more public, this coming Tuesday I'll probably be focusing on the “theme” of Resource Loader or API issues. Maybe once a month there will be an escalation triage where issues from the other triages that need input across domains will be brought up and discussed amongst those who need to be consulted.

For any issues that need immediate escalation or action by the Foundation, I'll notify Robla or CTWoo so that they can find the right person to act.

Now for the notes from the meeting. See http://hexm.de/3x for the etherpad we used.

The first three bugs just need someone to do them. While no one in the triage meeting volunteered, anyone can quickly fix these. Consider these possibilities if you want to hack on MediaWiki this weekend:

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/29066 Cannot use inputbox with some page title

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/29123 Section edit links shown to anon users even if they can't edit

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/28648 New 404 Page

Now, the real triaging begins:

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/29153 Pages loading without formatting too often

This problem has been discussed in triage before, so I brought it up again to get a status update.

We've been working with some users on the bug to get more information on this problem, but we are still having trouble replicating the problem.

Since this seems to be tied to Resource Loader, it may be fixed during the RL sprint that the Features Team has planned for next month.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/29268 Import bug on several pages

On this particular bug, we decided to turn the import of these large pages into a shell bug. Other imports that timeout like can also be turned into shell bugs.

Since the issue of timeouts like this is not really a new problem, we're not going to spend a lot of time working on fixing the problem.

However, if someone is interested in a project, this would be a good one. A couple of ideas that were tossed around: someone could improve performance or make imports like this use the job queue.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/28466 Extension:TitleBlacklist doesn't seem to work on Commons

After a bit of discussion, Alolita said she would follow up with NeilK.

Sam and NeilK have bashed their heads against the bug, but NeilK just told me that they'll try again in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, if anyone else wants to have a look, go for it!

Since I was in the office this week, I used the opportunity to pester Tomasz about Offline and Mobile projects. This provided a good chance to talk about the Collections extension that we got from Pediapress.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/27574 PDF Export issue

The Pediapress developer (Volker Haas?) does not seem to have much time available for fixing bugs so we discussed finding a python-savvy volunteer developer to work on the code. If anyone wants to take a look, check out http://code.pediapress.com/ which should provide all the code.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/28223 iPhone Native Crash with UTF-8

Tomasz uploaded a non-crashing version of this iPhone application this week after our meeting.

We also discussed using Krinkle's TestSwarm instance (see http://toolserver.org/~krinkle/testswarm/) to test the new mobile extension. Tomasz said they already have the tests written so integrating them shouldn't be too much work.

Next we talked about some policy issues that a couple of bugs raised policy issues.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/28026 Enable e-mail EnotifWatchlist on all small wiki's

Because we want to measure the amount of email this will generate before we actually turn it on, we want to create a null mailer that will log via UDP so we can get counts without actually sending the emails. Alolita asked Roan to work on this.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/29279 Translate $digitTransformTable to International Digits for Hindi wikis

Priyanka and I both looked at this bug but didn't see any consensus. Based on Erik's feedback, we've asked them to keep the discussion open or, alternatively, point to some official government policy on the use of a particular digit set.

Next we discussed an old feature request:

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/248 $wgUseDynamicDates should work for other languages than English

I started out by asking if we should drop the feature (since it is obviously controversial) or adapt it for other languages.

Brion pointed out that there are issues with the current implementation and that adding it for other languages would be a huge pain.

As a result, we decided the status quo was fine and I closed the bug WONTFIX.

Since then, User:Jayvdb has started a discussion on Commons: http://hexm.de/3y

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/15434 Periodical run of currently disabled special pages

We discussed several possible ways to fix this (including Amir's suggesting from https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/28710 “make frequently updated special pages update themselves automatically”) but in the end we asked Priyanka to see how we can get these periodical updates running on a more frequently and updating the page with information about when it is scheduled to be run NEXT rather than just the last time it was run.

Happy Hacking!

Mark.