[Engineering] extension-list-labs is dead, long live extension-list!

[Chad Horohoe]

Hi,

In case you don't regularly follow the ops/mediawiki-config repository,
I've been doing some work to how extensions are deployed in Beta. Starting
today[0], extension-list-labs and extension-list-wikitech are gone and
should not be brought back.

When deploying an extension to beta, you'll want to include it in a way
that gets it ready for production (eg: include in CommonSettings, enable in
InitialiseSettings-labs.php, *explicitly disable* it in
InitialiseSettings.php for production). Relevant docs have been updated on
wikitech. There's a couple of motivations for this:

1) Remind everyone that beta is a gateway to prod. In the past we've had
extensions languish in beta and never make it to production. By explicitly
including it in a production-like manner, it keeps this testing mentality
fresh and protects against forever-deployed-but-never-promoted code.
2) Keep the technical differences between beta & production to a minimum.
This increases the reliability of testing in beta so we're more sure that
things are acting in a similar manner.
3) Remind everyone that code needs appropriate review (security,
performance, DBA, etc) before going to beta. This has always been policy,
but it sometimes comes up as a question. This makes process self
documenting.
4) Reduce race conditions when deploying to production. Deploying to
production will become a one-line change that can be safely deployed
without worry. Right now moving the config and inclusion pieces requires
either two commits or a specific order of operations in sync'ing it live.
Both are error prone.
5) Eventually get rid of extension-list too. Ideally we want to swap the
l10n rebuild stuff to use its `--extension-dir` so we can just copy the
code in and get picked up automatically. Yay less maintenance.

(spoiler: #5 was the reason I embarked on this adventure).

So yeah: not a huge change. Yes the l10n for production will include a few
extension that we won't want...but those should be minimal compared to what
we already build and deploy (also: see #1 above).

If you have any questions, feel free to ping me or anyone else in RelEng on
IRC.

Happy scapping,

-Chad

[0] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/415620/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/engineering/attachments/20180301/a6972873/attachment.html>