Problem #1 — causes huge increase in CPU load on web servers

Problem #2 — completely kills THE ENTIRE SITE when you DISABLE it because serialized LUDependency objects in the message cache can’t be reinstantiated.

Sigh… Why can’t life be easy :)

Update 2009-09-23 16:30: Roan is starting work on replacing the database storage layer with a flat-file which should be more efficient for our use case.

Brion Vibber, Lead Software Architect

Quick note for those who have been asking — we’re starting to maintain a list of feature & extension deployments that we’re rolling out in the very near future and their status on the Wikitech wiki.

Note that some things like the English Wikipedia FlaggedRevs deployment aren’t on there yet; we’ll start prepping something for these in the next round in a couple weeks.

– brion

It’s come to my attention that Commons has had some more problems than we saw on the other wikis… I want to make sure we get that cleaned up!

Andrew has just deployed some more fixes which should eliminate the ‘file already exists on Commons’ bug. It would be a huge help if folks who’ve been reporting problems can go through the lists on the Village Pump and collect just the problems that are still current:

• Uploads via Commonist — fixed or do we still have problems?
  • (Who’s the best person to contact about debugging or developing fixes for Commonist?)
• Missing description page immediately after edit — is this still happening?
• Anything else?

Please add info about confirmed problems or fixes at the Commons Village Pump. Thanks to everybody — your feedback is important; we need to know which bugs are affecting you guys the most!

– brion

Update 2009-09-22 23:49 UTC: I’ve fixed the problem with Commonist by relaxing the edit token check in the form handler (this is safe for uploads via the web, which can’t be injected in a CSRF attack; we still enforce it for upload-by-URL). This probably fixes most of the other client-side upload tools and bots as well — please test!

Renaming of uploaded files has been disabled for the last couple of months pending software updates; as of today it is now re-enabled for admins on all Wikimedia sites.

Local admins can now rename files as well as deleting them; this makes it easier to track history for images and other media that need to be moved to another name.

– brion

Update 00:49 UTC 22 Sep: We’ve tracked down a bug which at least on en.wikipedia would cause the redirected old name to stop working for 24 hours. Now fixed; notes for cause and workaround on enwp Village Pump.

Due to compatibility problems on Internet Explorer after yesterday’s code update, I’ve temporarily disabled the Usability Initiative’s beta advanced toolbar. If you’ve had it enabled, you’ll just get the regular old edit toolbar until we re-enable it.

Hopefully we should have this resolved within a day or so, and it’ll be back on for all our happy testers!

– brion

Update Sep 18 14:13 UTC: the bug has been fixed, and the toolbar has been reenabled.

I’ve been spending much of the last few work days tidying up an update to our deployed codebase, which has been several weeks behind development for most components.

I’ll want to start deploying this in the morning (Pacific time), so we’ll have most of the day to poke around and fix up any problems on the sites… it’s gonna be fun!

This’ll primarily bring a lot of under-the-hood improvements, which’ll let us start rolling out other fun things over the coming days/weeks including:

• Daily updates of interface translations (LocalisationUpdate)
• Updated PDF collection/book UI
• major cleanup of maintenance scripts
• foundation work for improved uploading support
• foundation work for new UI stuff (JS2 / add media wizard / cool stuff from Usability team)

For those of you poking at the code, I’ve got the pre-deployment code currently sitting in the wmf-deployment-work branch; this’ll get folded back over wmf-deployment when we’re ready to go.

I believe all custom hacks from the current wmf-deployment branch have been either copied over or generalized and merged via trunk… Note I’ve held back updates on ProofreadPage and OggHandler for the moment, and we won’t deploy the new JS2 code yet until we’ve shaken things down some more.

If there are any *critical* trunk fixes from the last few days (since r55160 trunk branch point) that need to be forward-ported before we start, or any other surprises, let’s make sure we know about it soon. :)

– brion

Update 1:30 UTC Sep 17: Most problems have now been shaken out. Probably a few more minor glitches to go, then we can worry about prepping the fun stuff! :)

Brion Vibber, Lead Software Architect

Yesterday’s tech talks from Wikimania are online at our temporary video file staging location (Ogg Theora format). They should appear on Commons soon. :)

Update: Some of the movies have encoding problems; reencoded versions should be reposted within a couple days. Sorry!

Hacking was cut short a bit on our first day at Wikimania yesterday due to troubles with the conference facility network :( but we did get a lot done:

• Some basic specs and programming interface for a configuration database have been hashed out — once implemented, this’ll give us infrastructure to start phasing out the more fragile parts of LocalSettings.php editing and making it much easier to manage both multi-wiki sites and one-off installs!
• Bunch of folks hashed out some details on getting our mapping servers set up and online
• Lots of general code review and poking!

Feel free to join us during the day — project page on Wikimania wiki and #wikimania-codeathon on IRC!

The fun is starting! Get your code on…

• Wikimania_Codeathon/Projects
• #wikimania-codeathon on irc.freenode.net

What happened?

A few highlights from the last week…

• The first version of Wikimedia’s official Wikipedia Mobile app for iPhone has hit the iTunes app store (free download). As with all Wikimedia software, it’s open source and we welcome patches and bug reports! (Unfortunately there’s a known problem with this release which prevents installation on first-gen iPod Touches — just use the mobile web site for now, which shares the same backend.)
• Test wikis with Flagged Revisions and ReaderFeedback configurations have been set up to shake down UI and workflow before we prepare to deploy these extensions on English Wikipedia in the coming weeks. The test sites have been populated with featured articles, and should be getting some decent front pages soon. ;)
• A push of new donation buttons to English Wikipedia to test response rates has been delayed until we’ve got more of our techs in one place again.
• Mark is completing performance testing of SSD-based Squid proxy servers.
• We encountered failures on ms2, one of our text storage servers, which has required some behind-the-scenes running about.
• Ariel and River are bringing media storage replication between our Tampa master and Amsterdam off-site copy back up to date after cleaning up most of the base configuration.
• There’s been a lot of talk on-list in the last couple weeks about testing infrastructure, with various people poking at the parser tests and the other half-done test suites. This is a happy thing and I hope to see more solid tests going — and more automated reports into CodeReview like the parser tests!

The week ahead…

Come with us if you want to code!

It’s Wikimania week in Buenos Aires, and the Wikimania Codeathon starts this Tuesday at 10am (15:00 UTC). If you can’t be there in person, join us online in #wikimania-codeathon on FreeNode.

What’s going to happen? We can’t say for sure ahead of time, but here’s a few of my favorites I hope to work on:

• Deploying updated MediaWiki code to Wikimedia sites!
• Exploring the power of jQuery and Michael Dale’s advanced media features in JS2 mode!
• Pushing LocalisationUpdate to fast-track the work of our tireless translators!
• Driving plans for the Usability Initiative’s new UI work!
• Bringing forth the power of Flagged Revisions!
• Awesome times with OpenStreetMap testing!
• Hashing out plans for a MediaWiki configuration database… down with LocalSettings.php once and for all!
• Figuring out how to start Selenium-based MediaWiki testing!
• …YOUR project?

Now put on yer codin’ legs and get typing!