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.

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; nevertheless, in doubtlessly a positive sign, developers seem to be treating the vast majority of the problems encountered (such as an awkward system for responding to comments and the overly personal nature of the autogenerated 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. Indeed, work on a number of these issues has started already; others will however require changes to Gerrit itself. On the whole, then, developers, seem to be hopeful that all their issues with the new code review process can be resolved given enough time. 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), too difficult for new contributors to get to grips with, or overly conducive to the kind of endless bar-raising that would see the gap between old and new contributors continue to widen.

Though the current trend suggests that issues will continue to be either resolved or ameliorated over the coming weeks, a potential future fly in the ointment is a planned audit of Gerrit's performance in three months' time. Such an audit, a pre-switchover concession to those who initially disliked Gerrit, has the potential to lead to the code review system actively being abandoned in favour of a competitor system such as Phabricator. Needless to say, should grievances with Gerrit not be resolved by then – with or without great appetite for a second difficult migration – the audit could be a difficult one to manage.

Chennai hackathon

Write-ups of the Chennai Hackathon (held in the Indian city on March 17) began to be posted online this week, giving an insight into the success of a hackathon with a deliberately broad remit. Overall, thirteen projects were demonstrated at the end of the day, including a "text-a-quote" service, a handheld device-based pronunciation recorder and work on a instant image rotate function accessible from file description pages (wikitech-l mailing list).

In total, the hackathon (one of an increasing number of tech-focused Wikimedia meetups being scheduled across the globe) attracted some 21 programmers, overwhelmingly but not exclusively male. In writing up the event, WMF developer and attendee Yuvi Panda described why he thought coders at the "super awesome and super productive" event were able to get so much done in a single eight-hour day: Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Quote

In brief

Signpost poll

3rd Party Auth

Vote now on next week's poll: If you were responsible for selecting Google Summer of Code proposals to go forward with, what would be your top priority?

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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