Mailing List Archive

TechCom Radar 2020-07-29
Hi all,

Here are the minutes from this week's TechCom meeting:

== RFC: Stop supporting legacy PHP entry point extensions ==
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T258845>
* New RFC by Kunal (Legoktm) that proposes gradually ending support for
legacy
PHP entry points
* TS: The RFC proposes ending support for legacy entry points by MediaWiki
1.43,
which could be five years from now.
* GL: That long of a timeline might be too conservative considering that
there’s a viable
migration path. Wikidata is removing it from production this week. The
percentage of
extensions on gerrit using the new system leads me to believe that we can
do this on
a shorter timeline, especially if there are advantages to not having to
support the legacy
entry points.
* RK: 1.35 will be an LTS release that ships with support for legacy PHP
entry points,
giving longer support to projects that need it. We could remove them before
1.39, our
next LTS release.
* TS: If there’s a large extension or project that needs it, we can be
sensitive to the
timing of the deprecation.
* Discussion continues on the task

== Consolidate language metadata into a 'language-data' library and use in
MediaWiki ==
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T190129>
* NL: No remaining unanswered questions that would change the direction of
the proposal.
* Ready to move from P3 (Explore) to P4 (Tune)

== RFC: Render data visualizations on the server ==
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T249419>
* DA: This RFC is stalled due to pushback on the technical side coupled
with inactivity on
the product side. Client-side visualization seems to be uncontroversial so
far, but I took the
inactivity as a decrease in priority. I’m still interested in the problem
technically, but it needs
proper resourcing and stewardship. Any change away from current
architecture runs into
other problems. I proposed to take a deeper look at how we store graph
definitions.
* GL: We un-deployed Graphoid from Group 0 and 1 only, which may be the
cause of the
lack of feedback.
* DA: I wouldn’t suggest re-deploying Graphoid. The idea was to deploy a
new version,
new repository.
* TT: Removing Graphoid from group 2 could change the priority. When we
un-deploy
Graphoid, there will be a gap when getting things from Siri as well as
impact to the graphs
on pages related to COVID-19. I did hear some interest, but we need actual
resourcing.
* GL: For anything going into production from now on, we’re considering the
typical
performance expected and determining an error budget. If a project overruns
its error budget
for the quarter, the responsible team will be required to do something
about it, either make it
more stable or lose SRE support.

== RFC: Normalize MediaWiki link tables ==
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T222224>
* TT: There’s currently a straw-man proposal open for feedback. Waiting for
DBA feedback.

* No IRC discussion scheduled for next week

You can also find our meeting minutes at
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Committee/Minutes>

See also the TechCom RFC board
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/mediawiki-rfcs/>.

If you prefer you can subscribe to our newsletter here
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Newsletter:TechCom_Radar>

--
Alex Paskulin
Technical Writer
Wikimedia Foundation
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