The production mediawiki deployment includes a symbolic link /srv/mediawiki/php which points to one of the live php-<train-version> directories. The link is stored within the operations/mediawiki-config git repo. Whenever the train is promoted to group1, the symlink is updated to point to the latest version, a commit is made to record this change, pushed to Gerrit, merged, and pulled down to the deploy server, and an additional sync of the symlink is performed to all servers (which adds about 10 minutes to the Wednesday train operation).
It's unclear what the /srv/mediawiki/php is used for (I can't find anything that references it).
I propose removing the symlink and the associated scap code which manipulates it.
- Locate and deal with apparent users of /srv/mediawiki/php
- Add way to disable /srv/mediawiki-staging/php management in scap.
- Leave the php symlink unmanaged for a few train cycles. Since scap clean runs weekly, eventually the php symlink will become stale (pointing to a non-existent php-<version> directory). Fix any problems that result (hopefully none).
- Remove the php symlink from the operations/mediawiki-config repo.