Wikimedia Technical Committee/Minutes/2020-09-02

Present: Daniel, Dan, Niklas, Timo.

New RFC: Challenges of developing with npm dependencies

 * The “frontend build step” RFC is overly broad, and has drifted over time, see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T199004
 * Dan will draft a new RFC focused on some of the issues we encounter in the Analytics team when developing Node.js services. Specifically around code review, CI/deploy, and dependency auditing.

Parsoid extension API

 * https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T260714
 * TT: this is a major milestone RFC, the new parser will replace the old one. Hooks and methods not mentioned here will likely be deprecated/removed. I believe that’s well-understood and the
 * Parsoid team did great outreach over the past year. This should be detailed and summarised on the RFC, or linked to.

Session expiry

 * Pywikibot users have been experiencing CSRF tokens, see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T261050
 * This may be due to the fact that we have become more strict about expiring web sessions after a given time since we moved session storage to the Kask service.
 * It is currently unclear from the documentation for how long a CSRF token is valid for. This should be made more clear.

Removal of unused code without deprecation

 * Daniel proposed a change to the stable interface policy on wikitech-l, in a thread titled “Making breaking changes without deprecation?”
 * Reactions are mixed, more feedback welcome.
 * The input from the mailing list will be used to update the current policy