See below for an extract of the discussion on the recurring disappearance
of interface messages recently. It was a mistake for the discussion to
unfold on an internal list, but it happened quite by chance, starting with
an incident report and developing from there.

---
Ori Livneh
o...@wikimedia.org


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ori Livneh <o...@wikimedia.org>
Date: Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 1:23 AM
Subject: Re: [Engineering] Localisation not working on MediaWiki.org
To: "Brad Jorsch (Anomie)" <bjor...@wikimedia.org>
Cc: Bryan Davis <bd...@wikimedia.org>, Development and Operations Engineers
<engineer...@lists.wikimedia.org>


On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 6:56 AM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie)
<bjor...@wikimedia.org>wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 9:37 PM, Bryan Davis <bd...@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> The obvious change that caused this was that `mwversionsinuse
>> --withdb` changed from returning "1.23wmf21=testwiki" to
>> "1.23wmf21=test2wiki". This result is used within scap by the
>> mw-update-l10n script to run the maintenance script that builds the
>> ExtensionMessages file. In theory the exact wiki passed to `mwscript
>> mergeMessageFileList.php --wiki=<WIKIDB>` shouldn't matter, but
>> obviously there are now some circumstances where it does indeed
>> matter.
>>
>
> It looks to me like it has always mattered to an extent: the final result
> from maintenance/mergeMessageFileList.php is the combination of extensions
> loaded for the --wiki wiki (e.g. in CommonSettings.php) and the extensions
> loaded by the script itself from the passed list of extensions. Hopefully
> the latter is always a superset of the former so that turns out not to
> matter.
>

Interface messages went missing again on wikidata.org. l10nupdate ran
updates on cawikibooks, where $wmgUseWikibaseClient is false. The theory
that the exact wiki shouldn't make a difference is pretty shaky. You should
expect to run on testwiki and fail loudly if you can't.

We should rethink our whole approach; I don't have any confidence in the
architecture. What is especially damning is not so much the recurrence of
failures as the way they were discovered (that is to say: by chance) and
the hard time we have had reasoning about their cause and the state of
localization on the cluster generally.
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