This is a follow up from discussion of T355879: Make PHPUnit, Selenium, and API testing tests pass with temp account feature flag enabled:
In T355879#9585434, @kostajh wrote:I thought about this task some more, and would like to consider an alternative approach: don't bother creating new temp-account-specific CI jobs and attempting to have CI handle two different anonymous editing paradigms simultaneously. Just set $wgAutoCreateTempUser['enabled'] = true; in DevelopmentSettings.php in the "experimental" section, like we're doing in DevelopmentSettings: Enable auto creation of temp users, get all the tests to pass (we are not that far off from doing so), then, after we've merged that patch, it would mean:
- MediaWiki uses temp accounts by default when using DevelopmentSettings.php
- CI only tests temp accounts paradigm for master branch (REL_ branches would be unaffected)
- Regressions relating to anonymous IP editing would be caught by PHPUnit tests that explicitly switch off temp accounts functionality, or via manual QA / logs review on beta wikis and testwiki / testwiki2
I am leaning toward this way because:
- Creating duplicate jobs for Selenium/API testing/PHPUnit is going to be time-consuming to do (updating Quibble, building new images, crafting new jobs, deploying a bunch of new jobs) and time-consuming / resource intensive (we already struggle at times with having enough capacity for CI)
- Most of our existing tests are not badly broken with $wgAutoCreateTempUser['enabled'] = true; which suggests that we don't have a lot of tests targeting anonymous IP editing anyway. From that, I infer that it is probably not going to be missed much in CI if those tests no longer operate in that paradigm.
- Temp accounts are in the near term future (see also T355880: Decide long term strategy for temp account default) for WMF. We should not invest substantial time and resources in maintaining a dual anonymous IP editing paradigm in CI, when those time/resources could be better used elsewhere