[Labs-l] New-user experience on Wikimedia Labs

[Fran McCrory]

Hello,

I was recently encouraged by a couple of friends to document my attempts to
get started with Wikimedia Labs. Over the past week or so, I've found
getting started with Labs to be quite buggy and difficult, even for a
seasoned user of Unix, MediaWiki and Git like myself.

Ori Livneh asked me earlier this week if I would like to help out with his
event-logging code, as part of the greater editor engagement project. Since
I had a Labs account created back during Wikimania so I could access Gerrit
(and had successfully reviewed and committed code with within Gerrit), he
added me to the "editor-engagement" product so I could ssh in and take a
look. However, I ran into the first of many speed bumps.

Apparently I had a Labs account, but not a Labs *shell* account. I
submitted a request, and it was processed within eighteen hours. (Not bad,
since it was a Sunday just two days before Christmas.) However, in trying
to use my shiny new shell account, I soon found that I couldn't actually
log into anything, because I needed to be a member of the "bastion" project
to get into the separate network where instances live. This required asking
a few times over the course of two days in #wikimedia-labs until someone
was eventually around to add me by hand. (I'm at a loss as to why the two
processes are separate; why would one desire a shell account that can't
actually access anything?)

Once I had bastion access, I actually tried logging into the instance in
question, kubo.pmtpa.wmflabs. Setting up my .ssh/config was simple enough,
but my connection would instantly die with the error "Unable to create and
initialize directory '/home/fran'." Wizards in #wikimedia-labs suggested
rebooting the instance, but thanks to an error the instance control
interface on labsconsole wasn't even available; I had to log out and back
in again for it to appear. After the instance was rebooted, I still
couldn't log in... and neither could Ori, now. The wizards tried a few
things, then told me they were out of ideas and to create a new instance
for myself. This wasn't really an optimal solution, and it was late at this
point anyway, so I retired for the night.

A couple days later, the wizards fixed it and I could finally log into
kubo. But alas, now I can't log into Gerrit anymore ("Server Error":
"Cannot assign user name"). I'm waiting for folks to get back to me about a
fix. (Incidentally, with the delays, code review is pretty much all I can
help Ori with, since he's written most of the code in the time it's taken
to set up.)

In general, I think the experience for new users could really use some
smoothing-over and rigorous testing. (In particular, why not have a single
account-creation process, rather than separate accounts for Git, shell, and
bastion access?)

Thanks,
Fran McCrory
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