Wikimedia Release Engineering Team/SpiderPig/Decision log

Date Category Decision Why? Comments
2024-08-27 Technical Limiting initial project scope to remove the queue and pre/post deployment claim/release. And all logged in users will be able to view deploys in progress. This limits the scope of development to only a web-based version of scap backport and that's it. Also, this may be hard to get right by guessing how users will use the tool. Winnowing scope/YAGNI. Decided in 1-on-1 with Tyler Cipriani + Ahmon Dancy
2024-09-05 Technical Decided to have the web front-end communicate via API calls do a persistent jobrunner daemon. These two processes will communicate via a job queue/database. Allows web API calls to remain quick and light-weight while providing persistent monitoring over long-running processes. Decided in "SpiderPig Struggle" meeting.
2024-09-13 Scope/Technical Acknowledging that should the persistent jobrunner daemon process fail during a deployment, in process jobs will not be recoverable. The jobs themselves are a part of a separate process group and will outlive the daemon process failure (but will likely fail once they attempt to write to the closed file descriptors that were owned by the jobrunner). Solving this problem expands scope of the jobrunner for little benefit. A robust jobrunner should not fail often. This is a cost-benefit trade-off. Context on scap!433 + followup conversations.
2024-09-26 Project Attempt to use Codex for frontend code, pairing with Eric Gardner from design systems for a two week effort Provides us with a familiar, Official™ look and feel to our tools. Design systems is available for initial support. Decided in "SpiderPig Struggle" meeting.