User:NeilK/Worklog/2010-12-21 to 2010-12-27

Projects: Upload Wizard, MediaStorage, Resource Loader

Status: chewy

Last week:
 * UploadWizard bugs
 * Able to help with RL a bit (did not do anything here)
 * Did a lot of research for MediaStorage, particularly on MogileFS

This week:
 * UploadWizard bugs
 * UploadStash backend?
 * Following along with MediaStorage, don't anticipate any work

We did not push a new release of UploadWizard since - the fixes are mostly IE, which our existing community cares the least about - we didn't test them, other than my own personal testing. Should involve community/Calcey. - Roan is busy with 1.17 & personal projects

It is becoming clear that we need to rewrite the backend of UploadStash to use a database. We have essentially unfixable race condition bugs when multiple servers are involved (or we'll have to write a concurrency layer on top of them; or simply accept less functionality). None of this playing around with caches or other ephemeral storage. Is not a long term strategy. Also we need to unify how different parts of the codebase (old and new) deal with stashing files. This collides with the plans to release 1.17 so Roan, Chad, Bryan & myself agree that it will depend on if I can actually get this done relatively quickly with a minimum of code. Will bump up the priority on that, right after urgent bugs with UploadWizard.

Tuesday Dec 21 2010
Decided not to release new UploadWizard (see above). Roan was fine with that.

Following along with TBleher's investigation of the SVG mime-type bug, which appears to be related to a three-year-old undiscovered bug (!!) in MimeMagic.php.

Meeting re: MediaStorage. Took minutes and posted them.

Knocked off some IE bugs. IE6 debugging is very hard, decided to try IE7 and see if that was any easier.

Wednesday Dec 22 2010
More IE. Sigh. Slowly fixing things, but IE is being cryptic about where the errors are. Trying better debuggers. I believe Trevor has a legit copy of VS Studio somewhere, but he's on vacation.

Made a number of jslint fix commits, since IE can easily lose its mind over trivial syntax issues.

Thursday Dec 23 2010
A few tenative fixes for the IE7 issues, but now there are some other problems to debug. After much research the only decent debugging environment I'm likely to be able to install is the VS Studio Express Web, a free download from Microsoft. Switching from IE7 on XP to IE7 on Vista, trying to upgrade system.

Friday Dec 24 2010
Holiday

Monday Dec 27 2010
I can't believe how long this upgrade is taking. Finally got my VMs in the almost correct state (had to make a copy, 40GB, which at first was broken (but I patched it with rsync). Then it turns out VS Studio Express is only compatible with Vista SP2. Upgrading to both SPs is slow, and compounded by running in the VM, so this is taking hours, and performance on this computer is notably sluggish.

Meanwhile Brion Vibber committed a change to use FileAPI local image previews (available in bleeding edge browsers) in the regular Special:Upload. Guillaume asked if that could be done with UploadWizard. I am somewhat surprised he is not aware at this stage that this was my plan all along, but repeated it for the benefit of Wikitech-l. Brion may jump in and add the change to UploadWizard if I don't get there first. Played around with adding this feature (with appropriate guards for mimetype & so on), got halfway there. Not much overlap with Brion's impl since we need "fallback" methods for previews, whereas if there's no way to preview in the old upload form it just doesn't happen.

This side of the office is totally empty -- even those who came to work today are affected by the sense that no one else is around.

Emailing Roan about deploy, maybe tomorrow to fix these stupid IE issues.

7:00pm finally got IE attached to a Visual Studio debugger... for now. Hurray. Will need one of Trevor's keys to make it permanent.