Preliminary analysis:

• The libvips/libmemcached are puppet bugs. These are libraries with a SONAME suffix and we shouldn't hardcode their SONAME in puppet. We shouldn't be bringing them in directly anyway; if they're needed, apt-get will bring them.

• The ttf-* prefix has been replaced by fonts-* in Debian (and subsequently, Ubuntu) and has been rolled out gradually. The way this works is that one release leaves the old package name but with an empty package depending on the corresponding replacement (a so-called transitional package). The transitional packages stay for a release, then get dropped. wheezy had some of those, as you can e.g. see here.

• That said, ttf-indic-fonts (or fonts-indic) in Ubuntu seems forked :( We should examine the differences to reach parity.

• ttf-ubuntu-font-family does not exist in Debian, as its license was considered non-free and after that, traction was lost (and hence was never uploaded even to non-free). Why do we need it, though? This is a very Ubuntu-specific font.

• ffmpeg is not in jessie, as Debian had gone the libav way. It's now in unstable and would expect to see it in jessie-backports soon (or we could do it, of course; it should be easy enough). However, I think we depend on libav in other parts of the MW infrastructure and depending on both sounds like a bad idea. We should investigate further.

Thanks @faidon for the preliminary investigation. Should I fill subtasks for the 5 points you mentioned? It seems that each will reach out to different group of persons, might be easier to track this way.

Change 218640 had a related patch set uploaded (by Dzahn):
mediawiki: update font packages for jessie

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/218640

In T95002#1195915, @hashar wrote:

Should I fill subtasks for the 5 points you mentioned?

Yes, i started with one for the font packages and a patch for that:

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/218640/

I have created sub tasks, the fonts related ones being under T102623. Result is:

• T103315: Jessie does not have libmemcached10
• T103322: Jessie does not have libvips15
• T102623: Mediawiki font packages: switch to Jessie
  • T103325: Investigate usage of ttf-ubuntu-font-family which is not available on Jessie
  • T103328: Investigate Ubuntu fork of ttf-indic-fonts and bring it in Jessie
• T103335: Investigate impact of switching from ffmpeg to libav (ffmpeg is not in Jessie)

Change 222999 had a related patch set uploaded (by Hashar):
Use libav instead of ffmpeg on Jessie

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/222999

Change 222999 abandoned by Hashar:
Use libav instead of ffmpeg on Jessie

Reason:
Per Moritz: ffmpeg will be backported.

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/222999

looks like all blocking subtasks are fixed now, @hashar how can we try this again? I tried accessing integration-slave-jessie-1001.eqiad.wmflabs with no luck

integration-slave-jessie-1001.integration.eqiad.wmflabs but you are denied somehow:

pam_access(sshd:account): access denied for user `filippo' from `bastion-restricted-01.bastion.eqiad.wmflabs'

Seems some patch has been cherry picked on integration-puppetmaster (I can't ssh to it right now) or landed in puppet.git. The instance last failure is unrelated to fonts:

Error: Execution of '/usr/bin/apt-get -q -y -o DPkg::Options::=--force-confold install php5-fss' returned 100: Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Reading state information...
E: Unable to locate package php5-fss
Error: /Stage[main]/Mediawiki::Packages::Php5/Package[php5-fss]/ensure: change from purged to present failed: Execution of '/usr/bin/apt-get -q -y -o DPkg::Options::=--force-confold install php5-fss' returned 100: Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Reading state information...
E: Unable to locate package php5-fss

That sounds promising!

promising indeed! we don't need php5-fss I think if we no longer need to run zend php, if we do need it we'll need to compile it on jessie and the current version of hhvm

If php5-fss is solely Zend, yeah I guess we can phase it out from mediawiki::packages::php5 when running on Jessie. I think Joe added logic for that.

For CI purposes the Zend 5.5 and HHVM jobs are going to run on Trusty. Until we switch prod HHVM to Jessie, but then Zend 5.5 will be keep on Trusty anyway.

sounds good, thanks @hashar, see also T131749: Make all role::mediawiki::* classes compatible with debian jessie which seems to have some overlap with this (general theme, mediawiki/appservers to jessie)

php5-fss shouldn't be needed even on Zend nowadays — Zend >= 5.5's native strtr() was made fast enough to make fss redundant.

@hashar: This bug can be closed, right? It seems T131749 fixed the remaining dependency problems.

We still ship php5-fss on Jessie (and Trusty) via mediawiki::packages::php5. Apparently it is not needed anymore.

It is probably all about removing that package from the puppet class.

Beside that, everything else has been sorted out from pinned lib versions to fonts and others PHP extensions.

Change 287603 had a related patch set uploaded (by Faidon Liambotis):
mediawiki: remove all php5-fss references

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/287603

Change 287603 merged by Faidon Liambotis:
mediawiki: remove all php5-fss references

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/287603

Puppet looks fine on the CI slave integration-slave-jessie-1001 :-}