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

What we have done since September 2012
Projects:


 * Lua
 * Tim, Brad, Chad, Aaron
 * Profiler
 * Richer Lua environment implemented:
 * mw.ustring
 * mw.language
 * mw.uri
 * mw.site
 * Deployment to English Wikipedia and 13 other wikis!
 * TemplateSandbox
 * Brad
 * Git/Gerrit
 * Chad, Christian
 * Upgraded to Gerrit 2.5, 2.6
 * Fixed various bugs
 * Set up Github replication
 * Beta Labs and Continuous integration
 * Antoine
 * Zuul
 * Extension unit tests
 * eqiad switchover
 * Aaron, Chad
 * Removed NFS dependency from Math, Timeline, ConfirmEdit, ExtensionDistributor
 * Read-only mode tested
 * Ceph support
 * Files/multimedia
 * Aaron, Jan
 * Job queue
 * Aaron
 * Performance
 * Duplicate removal
 * Refactoring
 * Redis backend
 * External DB backend
 * Admin tools
 * Chris, Aaron
 * AbuseFilter global rules
 * ConfirmAccount admin notification
 * CentralAuth mass account locking
 * Lucene search maintenance
 * Ram, Tim, Aaron
 * RMI timeouts
 * Wikivoyage migration
 * Chris, Sam
 * Extension review
 * Account migration
 * Wikidata
 * Tim, Sam, Chad, Chris
 * Code review
 * Deployment

Ongoing responsibilities

 * Deployment
 * Shell bugs
 * Test infrastructure
 * MediaWiki operations (performance, debugging, ops team support)
 * Code review
 * EducationProgram
 * Security issue response
 * Security issue response

Project ideas
Major projects:


 * OAuth
 * Chris's estimate: 2 weeks
 * Rob's estimate: 3 people for a month plus a full-team sprint for 1 week
 * Volunteer contributed deployments
 * Blame map extension
 * Category collation improvements (44667, 43799)
 * VipsScaler extension (Package in Ubuntu http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=libvips-tools )
 * Score extension
 * Search
 * Legacy search improvements
 * Solr investigation

As time allows:


 * Incremental architectural improvements
 * JobQueue:
 * Move to redis to reduce master load? (https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/39174/)
 * Implement immediate priority jobs
 * Aaron's estimate: Switch to Redis in 2 days full time plus 1 week monitoring
 * Caching improvements:
 * Redirect to canonical encoding (27935)
 * When a commons image is updated, update the pages that use it (22390)
 * Include version in thumbnail URL (17577)
 * Admin tools
 * Other things on http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Admin_tools_development

Back burner:


 * git-deploy
 * Configuration database

Questions for the group

 * Deployments/releases
 * Should we aspire to a faster cycle than once every 2 weeks?
 * How active of a role should we play in support of non-Wikimedia uses of MediaWiki?
 * Test infrastructure
 * What role should beta play in the deployment cycle?
 * Code review
 * What statistics should we track, and how should we go about getting those numbers?
 * Talk to Max, he started making some reports using the new REST api