On Sun, Sep 30, 2012 at 4:08 AM, Andrei Cipu <wiki(a)strainu.ro> wrote:
On Tue, Sep 25,
2012, Delphine Ménard <notafishz(a)gmail.com> wrote:
we can't at this stage enter in expensive improvements, because Labs is,
in the short to mid-run, destined to replace the "toolserver as you know
it"
>completely. It falls under the attributions of
the Foundation,
as hosting provider
of the Wikimedia Projects, to provide authors,
developers and
contributors with the technical tools they need to make their work
easier.
Why is this? The Foundation has always tried to provide some technical
tools, but
not all; it is not an exclusive job of the Foundation, and the
toolserver in particular has often (quite often!) provided support that was
not available anywhere else. It's good that more tools are being
developed and maintained. But in my opinion we need more entities, not
fewer, providing this sort of support.
And Ryan has said elsewhere that Wikimedia Labs is not intended to
replace the
toolserver. So why is WM-DE considering dropping the
toolserver? And why is the WMF considering not providing db replication
for it? I thought the goal was to make that easier, not harder.
Samuel, you're obviously not on the same page as the executive staff at
WMF (see Erik's email).
That's possible, and as Krinkle says it may well be my misunderstanding.
That's why I asked. Erik's email was thorough and detailed, I'm just not
clear about those few points.
I am not writing as a WMF trustee, but in my personal capacity as a
community member interested in the toolserver. This is a fairly operational
discussion, and not something discussed by the board; I only know about it
because I read this list.
Regards,
SJ
Following this thread, it's becoming more and more clear that before any
serious discussion of the toolserver's future, the
WMF needs to get it's
priorities straight. Do you or do you not want to replace the toolserver?
If you do, it seems like a sensible thing to do to keep as much of the
configuration as possible.
I've been looking at the labs in the last few days
and it seems to me that
it's architecture is overkill for doing simple things. I think more and
more people will choose to go with their own hosting for robots instead of
using the labs. This probably means money spent by the WMF in traffic,
since those users will be using the api instead of accessing the database
directly.