Re: [Wikitech-l] Upgrading HHVM to libicu52

Hi all, tomorrow, Thursday May 25th, I will be upgrading our HHVM servers to use a recent version of the ICU[1] library, a long-needed change that we are finally ready to perform: it allows us to stop maintaining an older version by ourselves, including having to patch it for any security issue. For details about the rationale and the long process involved, see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T86096 While the upgrade should be smooth, the ICU maintainers do not guarantee backward compatibility for collation, so to be sure that is addressed, we will need to run a maintenance script on all wikis that have $wgCategoryCollation set to anything including with 'uca', see

Since this script takes quite a long time to run[2], there will be some user-facing effect, during the transition period, namely, citing what MatmaRex says on the ticket: "After ICU is upgraded, but before the updateCollation script finishes, articles newly added to categories may appear out-of-order on category listing pages. The headings on them might be wrong in funny ways, too. Nothing else should be affected." If no last-minute showstopper blocks the process, I will be starting the procedure around 8:00 UTC, and log in the SAL[3] every step of the process. Don't hesitate to contact me on IRC (#wikimedia-operations on freenode, user _joe_) if you see some strange behaviour. Thanks in advance for your patience Giuseppe [1] ICU stands for International Components for Unicode [2] It is actually much, much faster to run now than it ever was, thanks to the amaizing work others have done to improve it, see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T58041 and https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T130692 [3] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Server_Admin_Log -- Giuseppe Lavagetto, Ph.d. Senior Technical Operations Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l