In the process of working on T119746: localisationupdate broken on wmf wikis by scap master-master sync changes the use of the l10nupdate user was simplified so that it no longer has its own ssh key pair for updating the MediaWiki servers and instead uses a scap command and the normal shared deployment key. As a consequence of this, the l10nupdate user will no longer be provisioned on normal MediaWiki hosts.
@faidon has asked several times why the l10nupdate user is not a system user. With the current state of the system this should now be possible:
- Renumber l10nupdate uid on tin and mira to use a system id (100-999)
- Renumber l10nupdate gid on tin and mira to use as system id (100-999)
- Change puppet to provision the l10nupdate user and group with new uid/gid
- Change puppet to remove provisioning ~l10nupdate/.gitconfig
- Remove /home/l10nupdate on tin and mira
- Restart cron on tin and mira to recognize the new uid/gid
See T119165: l10nupdate user uid mismatch between tin and mira for an explanation of why we want/need a static uid/gid for the l10nupdate account in general (TL;DR rsync+chroot uses numeric ids).