Out of curiosity, what all would be involved in the OS change?
The bike layers could be a nontrivial loss for some folks.
If no regular WMF staff are available for the OS changes and ongoing maintenance, and if the use of bike lanes (or other features) is significant in the opinion of the community, then I think that WMF contractor time should be an option for the changes and maintenance, although I would like to know how much that would cost before supporting that option, along with how strongly bike lanes (and other features supported by these servers) are wanted by the community. If the community has no strong feelings regarding the loss of these features and the contactor time would cost $30,000 in the first year then maybe the loss of these features is acceptable, but if there is significant community desire to maintain these features and the contractor time would cost $1,000 in the first year then I would probably support spending the money for contractor time for at least one year of additional service while WMF tries to recruit volunteers for future years. In the context of a $100 million annual budget, I am fairly confident that WMF could find $1,000 for an additional year of service.
This is just another small reminder that, because the servers which host
tiles.wmflabs.org and
wma.wmflabs.org (wikiminiatlas) and overpass-wiki run on a version of the OS (
Ubuntu Trusty) that is no longer supported (and hasn't been available for new instances since november 2017).
These services need maintainers and support by community members in order to keep them alive after dec 18th (after which wmflabs will phase out those versions) and before the EOL of early 2019 of the OS. Unfortunately it seems no one is stepping up so far to convert these machines.
As I was curious, I looked around on the tile server a bit and used what I could find to update
This is all the information that I could gather, but i'm FAR from sure if that is complete information and if I would break anything with a rebuild basing myself on that info, so any information on missing elements etc. would be appreciated. I've not gotten around to looking at wikiminiatlas.
If the services are not rebuild then likely they will just disappear at some point for all layer variants. This includes the mapnik, black and white, hill shading, hike bike layers. As I have no idea how many users of these services there are, it is hard to say what the effect of that would be.
DJ
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