With the code tree currently slushed, now is a good time to find and fix bugs BEFORE they end up in front of innocent users.

A couple of volunteers, John du Hart and Petr Bena, have been working diligently to get a deployment cluster going in the new Wikimedia Labs. I've already shown this to some people and we've shaken out a few problems, but we also need people working to fix the problems found so far and get this ready for a bigger test.

Please check out the cluster. If you're more inclined to fix problems then to find them, then you'll want to watch http://labs.wikimedia.deployment.wmflabs.org/wiki/Problem_reports. You can see that I've already put Rob Moen's gadget from last week to use for tracking bug reports. Thanks, Rob!

Don't expect a lot of problem reports right away since this hasn't been very widely announced -- we have some bits that we still want to get ironed out before we do a really big announcement.

A quick overview of the areas we want to fix before that big announcement:

http://en.wikipedia.deployment.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:Search

One of the things we hope to get working tomorrow with Oren Bochman, another volunteer, is the search backend.

http://commons.wikimedia.deployment.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:UploadWizard

I also need help with the UploadWizard instance in Commons on the deployment cluster. The javascript console doesn't show any errors, but the spinner doesn't go away either.

http://labs.wikimedia.deployment.wmflabs.org/wiki/Test_cases

If you're more interested in helping us create test cases and test plans for people who want a bit more structure in their approach to testing the 1.19 software then this is the page for you. Many thanks to Sumana for her ideas from the 1.18 deployment that I used here.

http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/DeploymentPrep

There are a few miscellaneous items more on the Operations side that any volunteer can help out with. If you think you can help out in one of these areas, stop by #wikimedia-labs on Freenode and talk to me (hexmode), Petr (petan) or John (johnduhart). Thanks to the infrastructure that Wikimedia Labs provides, this deployment test is almost entirely driven by volunteers, so your help makes a difference.

Please do look around, fix problems, and we'll svn-up on a semi-regular basis.

Thanks for any help and don't forget to check it out:

http://deployment.wmflabs.org/

Mark.