It's a recurring problem. Tool Y becomes popular, then becomes unmaintained. Other developers/WMCS/Toolforge roots/Standards Committee investigate, and find that everything is All Rights Reserved. Then the bot task/tool is dead until someone rewrites it, often years later.
Happened most recently with the SanFranBan of جار الله / JarBot, but that's definitely not an isolated incident.
ACN
On Thu, Dec 29, 2022 at 11:41 Maarten Dammers maarten@mdammers.nl wrote:
Hi Kunal,
Can you explain here and/or on https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Portal:Toolforge/Tool_sweep why you want to do this?
Maarten
On 29-12-2022 10:02, Kunal Mehta wrote:
Hi everyone,
tl;dr: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Portal:Toolforge/Tool_sweep
It has been nearly a decade since Toolforge came online. Since then, there have a been a lot of improvements to tool infrastructure, but many tools have not yet caught up. For example, new tools are required to have metadata in toolsadmin, and unused tools can now be archived/deleted.
I am proposing that we "sweep" through all tools, checking each one for:
- Indicating a OSI-approved license in the source code/metadata
- Having source code published somewhere
- Not loading external resources (for web applications)
- Having tool information and metadata in Toolsadmin or Toolhub
This is explained further on the wiki page, with proposed remediation steps.
There are roughly ~3,200 tools, if we split it up into batches by month, it's about 250 tools per month. Depending on how many people are interested sweeping, it could be doable :) ...or it might take multiple years to clear through.
Ultimately the goal is to support tool maintainers with bringing their tools up to standard rather than criticizing them for not doing so.
If you're interested in participating, please add your name to the wiki page :) I would like to kick this off in the first week of January.
Please let me know if you have any concerns, questions or suggestions.
Thanks, -- Kunal / Legoktm _______________________________________________ Cloud mailing list -- cloud@lists.wikimedia.org List information: https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/cloud.lists.wikimedia.org/
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