A conversation with @mmodell this week about testing patches like this one for wmf branch deletion / tagging led us to the conclusion that we need a reproducible (and probably ephemeral) dev & test environment for our deployment tooling, including:

• scap
• branch.py and friends
  • housekeeping tools like delete-wmf-branches.sh

This seems likely to necessitate, at least, reasonable approximations of:

• Gerrit
• A deploy host (and proxies?)
• n app server deployment targets

We briefly discussed using VMs, a docker-compose setup + some generated images in the style of MediaWiki-Docker, something in local-charts, or some combination of these, but didn't settle on anything super concrete.

This has come up in recent discussions and supports planned work on scap, train automation, etc., but probably hasn't been formalized anywhere as yet.