User:Dereckson/Blog

From Nasqueron Agora
Revision as of 23:18, 29 December 2012 by Dereckson (talk | contribs) ([//wiki.nasqueron.org/index.php?title=User:Dereckson/Blog&action=edit&section=new Add a new idea].)

Some topics I could blog about. Add a new idea.

Comments

Three level of comments

  • The header
  • The code documentation
  • The comments itself

The header

  • Project metadata
  • License

The code documentation

  • Javadoc (PHP) / XML code (.Net) formats
  • There are tools to automate the process (PHPDoc, Sandcastle, Doxygen, etc.)

The comments itself

  • Comments aren't paraphrase. You shouldn't rewrite in English what you wrote in code.
  • Explain to another people your code. Craft your comment with this explanation.

Credits

Thank you to Nojhan for the tip about explain the code to another people, and put the explanation into a comment.

Wikimedia configuration workflow

Last October, Andre Klapper became the new Bug wrangler of the Wikimedia Foundation.

He asked me to explain him our site requests configuration workflow.

In a nutshell, when a wiki wishes a configuration change, they follow this workflow:

  1. discuss the issue on the local wiki
  2. report the issue on Bugzilla (normally, they should add the 'shell' keyword as this stage, to indicate an action is required by a sysadmin with shell access)
  3. clarify the configuration change if needed
  4. the config change is then prepared, reviewed and deployed
  5. the bug is closed

Now, more often than not, a user will ask a configuration request or report a bug which is actually a config change without previous discussion. Or the issue has been discusse by 3 people on a huge wiki like en. de. fr.

In these cases, we "block" the configuration change with the shellpolicy keyword.

This is a signal to 3 users groups:

  • to the local wiki community in general, the bug requester in particular > "please launch a discussion to get a local consensus"
  • to the Wikimedia community at large (but generally there are ops people still in touch with wiki communities or stewards) > "please determine if this small discussion constitutes or not a local consensus"
  • to the tech people, "please wait before deploy"

Host a MediaWiki site: low cost solutions

  • 256 Mb VPS should be enough.
  • 128 not really (InnoDB)
  • Ideal seems to be 256 burstable to 512