User:Bryan Hilderbrand/Meeting Notes (10FEB)
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Attendees
- Ad Strack van Schijndel
- Bryan Hilderbrand
- Cindy Cicalese
- Lex Sulzer
- Rich Evans
- Yaron Koren
Meeting notes for MediaWiki "Infrastructure" (Project Canasta) Discussion (Wed Feb 03 16:30-17:30 UTC 2020)
Notes
The meeting voice transcription is available on the talk page.
- Yaron I hope this isn't just me, ideally other people will use this
- As a note, the project has the following parts so far (as defined on the Project Canasta on MediaWiki.org):
- A system that allows for creating a "starter installation" of MediaWiki plus some specified set of extensions and skins, possibly using Composer.
- A system that allows for publishing a downloadable version of this installation - and potentially the software environment around it, such as Apache, MySQL and PHP - using a tool like Docker or Ansible. (See /Infrastructure solution.)
- A mechanism to allow for installing wiki pages onto the resulting wiki, possibly using the Page Exchange extension.
- A set of wiki page packages to fit the various decided-on use cases.
- As a note, the project has the following parts so far (as defined on the Project Canasta on MediaWiki.org):
- Rich I have an investment in Meza, I'm willing to switch as long as there's something better.
- I'm also very interested in the "data structures" marketplace.
- Cindy I probably wont' use anything in my current role
- I feel MW is amazing software that has HUGE potential
- I also feel there's impediments to broader use, including:
- Difficulty in installing, maintaining, & deploying infrastructure
- MW Out-Of-The-Box is a blank page problem
- For some applications, there would be communities that would use it more if solutions existed (and it was known that it was available)
- Data structures are really important (& PX or some other way to share them would be extremely helpful)
- Infrastructure is a separate discussion
- For infrastructure, who is the customer? SysAdmins or New Users?
- Lex The project should be focused on organization & pragmatism
- Good software is voluntarily used
- Yaron My assumption is Docker is a sledgehammer
- Lex My implementation of Docker (when compared to Meza) is a sledgehammer
- Yaron It seems Docker is a better solution than Meza when considering how easy it works on different systems
- Rich Where do the Docker images "live"?
- Lex Could be anywhere, but typically on DockerHub (either public or private)
- Rich We need assurance all code is coming from a "reputable source"
- Cindy From Docker, images are described from YML files
- These can be inspected
- Some images are considered "official" by the maintainers
- Meza & similar are defined by YML files as well, so trust is involved in both paths
- There is an official MW image (from WMF)
- Yaron There's no guarantee of security, there could be a major bug in SMW
- Yaron Now I'm thinking the best thing to do is create something from scratch
- Ad What will be inside the container?
- Lex Lots of decisions, MW volumed in? MySQL in it's own container?, etc.
- Cindy I'm going to make another plug for orchestration, a level on top of the container
- Ad Can you run Kubernetes from your local PC (or AWS/other)?
- Cindy Yes
- Bryan Who is the customer? As an example, NASA started their wiki as a gorilla project under their desk. Could they use it? Would they continue to use it as they began to develop their own extensions?
- Yaron It should support most/all use cases
- Cindy There's a difference between development & production (and staging)
- Bryan You can "spin up" a Docker image & use it for testing (development), but that shouldn't be used in production until the changes are incorporated back into the "official" Docker image. Is that right?
- Yaron I think we should be able to "develop" & that part of the code would be outside of a Docker image
- Lex Another option is environmental variables, you could volume in all of LocalSettings extensions
Chat transcript
Content pulled from the chat record of the meeting.