[Engineering] MediaWiki-Vagrant needs testers for Debian Jessie changes

[Bryan Davis]

TL;DR See <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T136429> and try the new
jessie-migration branch.


The Wikimedia Foundation has been working on converting the majority
of its production server farm from Ubuntu to Debian for quite some
time. In August of 2016 that project advanced to the point of actually
converting the 252 servers running MediaWiki [0]. Today that work has
largely been done and the vast majority of MediaWiki is running on
Jessie.

Now it's time (past time really) for MediaWiki-Vagrant to catch up. We
have done this sort of thing once before with the switch from using
Ubuntu Precise to Ubuntu Trusty as our base image [1] in mid-2014. We
had fewer users then and only one supported virtual machine type. The
switch from Trusty to Jessie is also slightly more complicated because
the init system used is changing as well. This means that we have more
Puppet code changes to make than last time and more people who will be
impacted by the change.

For a little over a month several of us have been working on the
jessie-migration branch to get ready for the change over. I think we
are at the point that we could change over, but I want to have a
period of testing by a wider audience to see if we can iron out a few
more common issues before forcing everyone to either upgrade or
explicitly pin their MediaWiki-Vagrant virtual machines to the git tag
for the last Trusty compatible build.


== Testing the Jessie base image and Puppet profiles ==

Its recommended to test with a fresh MediaWiki-Vagrant checkout so if
things go badly you can easily switch back to your original install
and keep working.

$ git clone --recursive
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/mediawiki/vagrant mwv-jessie
$ cd mwv-jessie
$ git checkout jessie-migration
$ ./setup.sh
$ vagrant up

You can run vagrant roles list -e -1 to get a nice list of the roles
you have enabled on your normal Trusty VM install to copy over to your
Jessie testing VM. This one-liner liner might even do it for you:

$ cd mwv-jessie
$ vagrant roles enable $(cd ../vagrant; vagrant roles list -e -1)
$ vagrant provision


Give things a try and report issues as children of the tracking task
for this migration [2]. Barring major issues effecting many people, I
would like to merge the jessie-migration branch with the master branch
the week of March 13th.


[0]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T143536
[1]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/rMWVAdc73e2bee9dff1e0755d15cfe1376ee2dc6e141d
[2]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T136429

Bryan
-- 
Bryan Davis              Wikimedia Foundation    <bd808 at wikimedia.org>
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]]  Sr Software Engineer            Boise, ID USA
irc: bd808                                        v:415.839.6885 x6855