Maybe someone can translate the German better than stupid google translate for me, but it sounds like he's willing to support the existing infrastructure but not go any further (as in upgrade or supply anything we need) because Labs is going to be 'the equivalent' of toolserver or better by 2014, supposedly. Honestly, right now I doubt many people on TS 1) want to move to Labs (because of no WMF database replication being the biggest complaint) 2) Understand labs enough to work it (I don't, someone has offered to teach me, but I have to find the time) 3) It takes a lot of time to migrate and test. We simply just don't have enough man hours with our real jobs/school to make this move over, especially for single person tools.
DaB, I honestly support your decision if what I sad above is correct about the attitude, because I wouldn't want to work at toolserver either. No sysadmin wants to work with people constantly looking at them for why things will not work and then management who won't give the tools to do it.
I'm personally starting to get my tools and talking with my MMP Co-Devs about moving over to labs, but one project needs the Antispoof table from WMF databases which labs doesn't have. So are we ending all support for it and scrapping the project because of issues with the toolserver not being funded enough to work? Never have I seen a more crazy proposal to end support for services that aren't working already for a volunteer community.
DeltaQuad English Wikipedia Administrator and CheckUser ACC and UTRS Developer
On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 5:10 AM, Platonides platonides@gmail.com wrote:
On 25/09/12 00:51, DaB. wrote:
Hello all,
in these days WMDE (the chapter that finance the toolserver) is
discussing the
budget for the next year (2013); you can find it at [1]. At the moment
there is
no money for new toolserver-hardware in this budget and the CEO Pavel
Richter
is unwilling to change this ([2] in german) – because he fears that
there will
be a Wikilabs in 2014. It is not possible for me to run the toolserver
for
another year with the current hardware – you all know why. For this
reason I
will request a change of the budget at the general meeting at November,
so
there will be a vote about. If this vote should fail (and we get no
money for
new hardware), I am going to retire from my job as root at 30. December
I'm not longer able to tolerant the behavior of the german chapter and
the WMF
in matter of the toolserver; I do this for free and for fun, and it is
not
longer fun.
Sincerely, DaB.
So, out of fear that there may be a better alternative in two years time, he decides to stop supporting it now?
I know labs, and I'm not sure it will really be a better alternative. Currently, it isn't. The toolserver is much more reliable and flexible. I don't think labs will "win" in the near future, either. Although it might change in two years. Specially if no attention is payed to the toolserver for that time.
I see two big problems:
- If labs really becomes the "perfect tool hosting" in 2014, What
happens before we reach that? "Yes, your tool doesn't work, migrate to labs next year"
- We risk ending up with no good alternative at that time. labs is
still not good enough, toolserver has degraded so much it's unusable.
Not to mention the migration cost that would need to be payed by tool authors if forced to move. Although perhaps he doesn't care.
P.S: If you are in a board of a chapter that gives money to WMDE for the toolserver: Make sure that it will be spend for hardware.
[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Deutschland/2013_annual_plan_draft/...
[2]
meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Deutschland/2013_annual_plan_draft/de#Toolserver
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