[QA] Proposal for Zurich Hackathon: Production-like Vagrant

[Bryan Davis]

On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 1:21 PM, Arthur Richards
<arichards at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Bryan, it sounds like there is likely a way we could scratch eachother's
> backs on this one. I'm not familiar with the concept of 'roles' in puppet,
> so I'm not quite sure how our ideas overlap specifically - can you
> elaborate? Do you have any thoughts about how we can piggyback our ideas?

"Roles" are the units of Puppet configuration that Ori has made easy
to enable/disable in a local Vagrant install via various commands
exposed by the MediaWikiVagrant plugin. `vagrant list-roles` will show
the user a list of the available roles, `vagrant [enable|disable]-role
<NAME>` will toggle the state of role and `vagrant reset-roles` will
set everything back to the defaults.

I think the specific overlap is that we need to add more roles to
install and configure various extensions in Vagrant. If these roles
somehow applied modules from operations/puppet we would be reusing
code between production and Vagrant. Even if module reuse doesn't
happen we would be improving the out-of-the-box functionality for
Vagrant users by making more roles available.

One way we could piggy-back would be doing beginner vs advanced
tracks. Beginner/intermediate folks could add more roles patterned
after most of the current mw-vagrant roles which install and configure
specific extensions. A more advanced group could work on
refactoring/extracting code from production modules to allow code
reuse.

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