Wikimedia Platform Engineering/MediaWiki Core Team/Quarterly review, July 2013

Previous review: March 2013 (summary)

Outline for a review of the MediaWiki Core team which took place at WMF on July 15 (summary)

Previous quarter
We presented three projects as priorities leading up to June: Also, the "as time allows" projects: Other projects that were on an as time allows basis:
 * Auth systems (OAuth, SUL, OpenID)
 * Volunteer contributed deployments
 * VipsScaler (just a few days of work)
 * Score (nearly all done)
 * Category collation improvements - code review, scripts
 * BlameMaps
 * Search
 * Admin tools - cross-wiki warning messages. Last blocker for global AbuseFilter
 * review queue process - Greg will figure out logistics on this, working to make sure we cover both architectural readiness (e.g. Tim's review) and product scope (e.g. Howie's review).
 * Release cycle - Should we aspire to a faster cycle than once every 2 weeks?
 * Greg & Sumana to move forward on this to formalize the maintainership of the tarball & related activities.
 * Test infrastructure: What role should beta play in the deployment cycle? Do we make people deploy to beta before production, period?

Upcoming quarter
Major projects:

Deployment improvements
See Site_performance_and_architecture for the details Generally:
 * git-deploy
 * monitoring
 * deployment script improvements
 * multi-site awareness

Specific actions from 6/28 outage:
 * periodic backups of /a/common
 * mergeMessageFileList.php fixes/re-arch
 * get rid of need of extension-list file? find a more elegant means for collecting a list of message files for caching

Architecture formalization

 * Reviewing RFCs
 * Completing the architecture document
 * Writing RFCs
 * Making possible Oct-Dec 2013 projects more concrete
 * Even if we don't get to it ourselves, providing clear instruction to others (volunteers?) that might take this on
 * Candidates:
 * EditPage refactoring
 * Media handler

Time allowing/secondary projects

 * HipHop - more benchmarking, porting the LuaSandbox code, testing
 * Admin tools sprint - time allowing. A major push should happen the following quarter with the addition of a Platform PM

Deferred

 * Central code repo
 * Configuration database
 * Gerrit improvements (further BZ integration)