As some of you may have noticed, yesterday our engineering team noticed that 16 of our Gerrit repositories were very badly broken. Their branches and tags all seemed to have vanished, along with their configuration (this is stored in a special branch on the repository itself). All of the repositories except one have been restored to their state as of about midnight UTC on Thursday, September 6. What follows is an in-depth analysis as to what happened and how I fixed it, along with some commentary about what I learned along the way.

(more…)

This is a reminder to anyone who might have been considering coming to the Hack-A-Ton in DC. If you haven’t been following page on MediaWiki.org, we’ve recently updated it with additional information, including the venue.

This year, we will be meeting at the Embassy Suites in Tyson’s Corner, just outside of the city itself. By the end of this week we will have a breakdown of what to expect and when.

We’ve already got a fair number of people coming so far, and I’d love to see more there. So if you’ve been thinking about coming but haven’t said anything or know of someone who would want to come, please get in touch with either myself or Danese for more information.

Greetings MediaWiki hackers!

I am pleased to announce the upcoming MediaWiki Hack-A-Ton in Washington, DC.

As you are all aware, every year in April our good friends at Wikimedia Deutschland host the annual “MediaWiki Developers Meetup” in Berlin. At that event, the program is focused on demonstrations, workshops and small group discussions. To complement this, we’re planning the DC meetup to be focused solely on hacking, bugfixing and getting down and dirty with the
code.

We’re scheduling this for October 22nd-24th in Washington, DC. Some of the details haven’t been ironed out yet, but will be announced over the coming days as it is. So clear your calendars, and keep your eyes on MediaWiki.org and the mailing lists for more information.

Some travel assistance may be available for those coming a long way. I’ve also been told there will be swag of some sort for attendees :)

Chad Horohoe
Contractor, Wikimedia Foundation

And one more thing: I forgot to mention Bugzilla. To help track the event, we’ve added a new keyword, “bugsmash.” Prior to the Hack-A-Ton, we’d like people to start tagging bugs that should be tackled during the event. It will help the participants get started finding bugs, as well as bump the priority on a bug you’ve been wanting to see fixed.