Date: 2021-06-18
accepted
During the first iteration of development on the wikibase release pipeline, one of the goals was to build and run it against the master branches of MediaWiki, Wikibase and other bundled extensions (T270133).
Because of the lack of such docker images at the time the team decided to create our own, inspired by the work of the official docker images. The benefits of this decision was seen when previously untested parts of Wikibase (Multi Wiki testing client/repo ) now had some coverage on the master branch. During the development of the pipeline several issues were detected by using these custom docker images, sometimes the pipeline would breakdown days before a bug report would appear on phabricator.
This can be useful but also comes with some additional drawbacks that can affect the maintainability and the quality of the releases WMDE will produce.
As the priority of the release pipeline should be to provide stable and secure releases it could make sense to revert this initial decision of building our own image.
The decision to adopt parts of the testing done in the release pipeline for Wikibase CI is still pending. Depending on the outcome of T282476, custom images could then be required again and could serve as a base when used for testing in CI where the requirements for security or performance aren’t as high (T282479).
Since new releases would build upon the existing MediaWiki docker releases WMDE will only be able to produce releases once the upstream docker images are available.
To mitigate this potential blocker WMDE could take a more active role in producing these images by contributing to the MediaWiki-docker repository.