As part of T113210 [1], which is a broader discussion on track for the
developer summit, I am hosting two IRC office hours back to back [2] on
December 21st from 20:00 UTC to 22:00 UTC.
The previous office hour [3] focused on ways to reconnect to the shared
hosting community. This time two very different topics will be discussed.
*The open questions in the descriptions below are by no means meant to be
exhaustive, nor are they expected to be fully answered by the end of those
office hours. They are just examples to clarify the context of the titles.*
*Shared hosting technical alternatives*
During the last office hour on the topic of non-technical mediawiki
installs, people seemed very eager to discuss new technical solutions that
could offer a viable alternative to shared hosting.
Could new technologies like containers allow for performance/cost ratios
comparable to shared hosting? If not, how big would the penalty be? How
much maintenance would we have to do to keep deployment on such platforms
up to date?
Shared hosting has always suffered from the fact that it's not used at the
WMF and therefore only maintained on a volunteer basis. How would things be
different with new tech?
*Shared hosting support definition*
Shared hosting usage is already a reality and we should do a better job
accounting for it. Currently mediawiki contributors have no visibility in
what should be supported and to what degree. Our browser support is graded
and very clear, meanwhile our server-side support is not:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Compatibility
Should we model our server-side compatibility guidelines on the graded
system we have for browsers? If so, what would that look like? How could we
break down "shared hosting support" into more discreet server-side
capabilities?
[1]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T113210
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours#Upcoming_office_hours
[3]
https://tools.wmflabs.org/meetbot/wikimedia-office/2015/wikimedia-office.20…