Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-04-02/Technology report

Technology report

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Questions over Gerrit dominate developer discussions

The change in core version control system from Subversion to Git, insofar as it can be separated from the change in code review systems, seems to have bedded in well after last week's switchover (see previous Signpost coverage). By contrast, new code review tool Gerrit continues to prove controversial, spawning dozens of threads on developer mailing lists.

Though the issues raised (many of which seem, at least on the surface, to be fairly minor) are both too numerous and in many cases too technical to be adequately summarised in a couple of lines, some general comments can be made. For example, it soon became clear that developers were treating the vast majority of the problems encountered (such as an awkward system for responding to comments), the taglines that accompany certain types of review simply as issues – bugs needing to be fixed – rather than internalising them as complaints with the fundamentals of the new code review process. Work on a number of these has started already, though many will require changes to Gerrit itself. On the whole developers seem to be hopeful all their issues with the new code review process can be resolved given enough time, though how long this determination will take if they continue as they are now remains to be seen. Nevertheless, a handful of the the issues raised do seem to have real sticking power, including concerns that Gerrit's code review paradigm may be fundamentally ill-suited to the review of large or complex changes (wikitech-l mailing list).

One potential future fly in the ointment is a planned audit of Gerrit's performance in three months' time, a process which could lead to Gerrit actively being abandoned in favour of a competitor system such as Phabricator. Needless to say, should grievances with Gerrit not have been resolved by then – with or without great appetite for a second difficult migration – the audit could be a difficult one to manage. Either way, it could take many months before the dust finally settles on the migration.

Chennai hackathon

In brief

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.

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2 April 2012 (all comments)

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Does any of this have to do with the toolserver lagging almost 2 weeks behind at this time? MathewTownsend (talk) 13:57, 1 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I've updated the report with a section on toolserver lag; I'm guessing Friday/Saturday for the lag to be gone. Josh Parris 00:06, 2 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
How many people participate in each of the technology polls Jarry1250 manages? That kind of information would help to determine whether the results fairly reflect the opinions of the community. -- llywrch (talk) 18:49, 3 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- If you click on the images, you get a better idea of the numbers. Note that the figures quote last week were the only proper ones - week 1 couldn't be properly trailed the week before (being the first of its kind), and with the ones quoted this week, there were technical problems that stopped some votes being registered. 10 people have given their thoughts already on next week's topic, and I would expect to reach 20-25 by publication time - hardly loads, but not no-one either. So do please give your own opinion, if you're reading this :) - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 21:31, 3 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  - I do when I have an opinion on the poll question. Thanks for the answer, Jarry! -- llywrch (talk) 21:52, 5 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Restoration of one of the databases for toolserver is complete. Replication lag is down to 3 days as I type and should be caught up in a few hours. For more info, here is the post by DaB. Bgwhite (talk) 21:03, 3 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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