User:Bryan Hilderbrand/Meeting Notes (27JAN)

Attendees

• Ad Strack van Schijndel
• Bryan Hilderbrand
• Cindy Cicalese
• Gökhan Geyik
• James Montalvo
• Lex Sulzer
• Markus Glaser
• Rich Evans
• Richard Heigl
• Yaron Koren

Meeting notes for MediaWiki "Infrastructure" (Project Canasta) Discussion (Wed Jan 27 16:30-17:30 UTC 2020)

Notes

The meeting voice transcription is available on the talk page.

1. Rich Asked Yaron to describe what Canasta is.
   • Yaron Pointed to the Project Canasta page on MediaWiki.org and went over the four main components listed.
2. Rich Asked Yaron to describe the current needs.
   • Yaron We've heard from Lex, Cindy, Wikibase Solutions, and Bluespice, but haven't heard about Meza yet. I'd like to hear from James more about Meza.
3. James Provided links to Meza on MediaWiki and GitHub
   • James Meza is actively maintained
   • James We're currently on MW 1.31, but have a branch for 1.35
   • James Working on packages for maintenance
4. Markus Hallo Welt!/BlueSpice built a MW distribution based on Docker
   • Markus Just need to run Composer install to draw in all extensions, etc.
   • Markus We have many composer files for BlueSpice free, BlueSpice Pro, PDF feature, etc.
   • Markus We start with one composer file and add more for additional needs (extensions, etc.)
5. Gokhan I work on BlueSpice with Markus at Hallo Welt!
   • Gokhan Composer is handled by the Dev team
   • Gokhan It's stored on GitHub and we try to keep it as small as possible
   • Gokhan We use Continuous Integration testing
6. Markus Showed the Hallo Welt GiHub repo
   • Markus We have the same Docker environment for BlueSpice Free & Pro
   • Markus We have to think about how to make the system flexible
   • Markus The method is platform independent
7. Cindy How do you provide containers to people?
   • Cindy Do you give them the Docker image? Any need for orchestration?
8. Gokhan We are using Harbor as a private registry. Docker Hub. Building is the same
9. Lex My solution is not an alternative to Meza, it's a post process
   • Lex Something should create a MW root structure, my solution acts on this
   • Yaron Your solution seems to have 2 steps:
     1. Set up MW
     2. Package it
        • Lex Yes
10. Markus It's important to separate the two parts:
    1. MW Creation
    2. Packaging MW
    • Markus We also need a method for content
11. Lex I'm not planning on copying all the old wiki DB, I'm starting with a clean MW installation
    • Lex
12. Markus I've seen many build scripts created by someone, then abandoned
    • Markus We wanted to use something (Docker) that is supported so it will last longer
13. Ad When we think about a "package" (i.e. CRM), a lot of it's use/power is the content
    • Ad It seems we will always require scripts
14. Markus Ad makes a great point here.
    • Markus There's "functional content" - this crosses the border between Wiki & Lua for example
    • Markus Still this should be a separate thing, e.g.
      1. SMW + Page Forms/Templates/Properties
      2. Should split the two so someone can just get SMW
15. Markus Docker is great when nothing changes
    • Markus When we need to admin stuff, change parts, tinker w/networking, Docker makes this difficult
    • Markus It's great for testing & light-weight production
    • Markus Basically, any recipe will not work Out-Of-The-Box with a complex environment
    • Cindy That's consistent with what I've been saying about the need for an orchestration layer on top
    • Cindy Need a future enhancement with different Kubernetes environment profiles for different production needs
    • Cindy There is an effort by WMF to use Kubernetes to deliver MW (not going anywhere fast yet)
16. Markus Question for Lex, "What is the connections between the distribution package and the Docker file itself"?
    • Markus Am I assuming correctly that you would execute these scripts or put the files in the correct place using the docker compose? Or are you mounting things outside?
    • Lex Take a look at my code
17. Yaron Sounds like we are splitting "Infrastructure" into:
    1. Creating a wiki structure
    2. Packaging/Distributing the structure
18. Cindy What about Podman vs. Docker?
    • Cindy I believe Kubernetes will stop supporting Docker in place of containerd
    • Lex Database infrastructure layer is not one of our business object layers
    • Markus If Docker goes away, there will be hundreds of people creating migration scripts to the new systems
19. Rich Meza has a goal, if the user has CentOS & internet, then 3 minutes later they have a running wiki
    • Rich Meza can:
      1. Create a system to tinker, then destroy
      2. Run your production server
      3. Meza takes all database/image directories for all wikis & "volumes them in" & captures all other things that make that wiki unique
20. Cindy Quick note, Meza does not use Docker
    • James Meza did use Docker at one point (for memcached or something), but it's since been removed
21. Lex Have you noticed Ansible is brittle?
    • Lex I use Ansible and love it, but you have to pamper it & it breaks often
22. James Some info about Meza
    • James Travis runs against every build
    • James An important thing is keeping things running
    • James Meza has a full Dev → Prod methodology
    • James With Continuous Integration, we can tell when something bad happened
    • James It's not perfect, but it's very stable
    • James This all comes Out-Of-The-Box with Meza
23. Bryan Can we have a place that shows all the options with help about how to test/run each?
    • Yaron Yes, please have Hallo Welt!, BlueSpice, Meza, & others put their options on a common page like Project Canasta's Infrastructure solution page
24. Markus After this discussion, I realized we have different approaches that aren't actually competitors, but tackling different parts of the whole picture
    • Lex Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive (MECE)
25. Bryan Sounds like in addition to placing different solutions on a common page, state the goals of the solution, & what it doesn't do
26. Lex My goal is to remove all barriers for someone to create a wiki

Chat transcript

Content pulled from the chat record of the meeting.

• Markus https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project_Canasta/Infrastructure_solution
• Bryan https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project_Canasta/Infrastructure_solution
• Bryan (beat me)
• Markus hehe!
• Lex https://github.com/dataspects/mediawiki-canasta
• Bryan https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project_Canasta
• Bryan Previous meeting notes:
  • https://mwstake.org/mwstake/wiki/User:Bryan_Hilderbrand#Project_Canasta
• Bryan https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Meza
• Bryan https://github.com/enterprisemediawiki/meza/
• Rich fyi, I can't hear Gokhan well. did anybody else have trouble hearing him?
• Gokhan Oh let me switch to internal microphone.
• Bryan https://github.com/hallowelt/mediawiki
• Bryan Infrastructure is split into two? Is this right?
  1. Creating a wiki structure
  2. Packaging/Distributing the structure
• Bryan I think that's right.
• Rich Does anyone have any insights on using "redis" rather than "memcached" for fast caching of "key value" data pairs?
  • ref: https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Caching
• Cindy Unfortunately, I need to leave for another meeting. Great conversation as always. Looking forward to more in the future.
• Rich Bye Cindy. Thank you!
• Richard Me too. Have also to leave now. :-( CU soon! Thanks for the interesting discussion
• Rich Aye. ty!
• Markus I will have to leave in 5 minutes
• Gokhan Also I have to leave in 5 minutes. Thank you very much for this meeting.
• Markus See you all next time! Thanks for the great discussion
• Gokhan Have a nice day/evening thank you all.