On Thu, Jun 05, 2014 at 10:21:29AM -0700, Gabriel Wicke wrote:
Matt & I have published our draft goals for the
nascent Services team [1] at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Services/Roadmap
Your feedback would be much appreciated.
- These goals are vast and in very exciting in general. Clearly the team
has a vision and a lot of thought has been put into compiling this big
list of tasks. Kudos to both of you for writing this up and sharing it
with us, this is incredibly useful!
- At the same time, some of these goals are /too/ specific and do not
leave much up to interpretation and deliberation.
For some of these, we haven't agreed if they're towards the direction
that we're going to take (minor example: "leverage packages as much as
possible for deployment, DRY") and the goals process is not really the
proper forum to make those decisions.
Making them a bit more abstract ("work on improving our production
deployment strategy") would help keep our options open and avoid
misunderstandings when the time comes.
- On a more specific note, I'm still personally in doubt on whether the
MWCore team has signed off on a) the storage service plans b) static
Parsoid HTML5 for all page views plan, especially in the detail
articulated in your goals. As this is a big part of your plan for next
year, I think it's worth clarifying.
- This is *a lot* of work. Are you sure you can pull this off?
As more of these core services get deployed, you're going to incur
some of the costs supporting those deployments. This is essentially
the "ops problem" of scheduling work; both us and MWCore know well how
this can throw off our plans and schedules and we tend to account for
it. Have you considered this?
Moreover, my impression of the team's charter is that it will also
have a supportive role to other teams that want to write or use
services. I see you've accounted for some of that (e.g. mobile) but I
think you should probably expect more of it as SOA catches up within
the foundation.
Finally, I think you should expect some (healthy, I hope!) amount of
debate and consideration for certain things you intend to do,
something that can also be quite time-consuming, obviously :)
(what are the week numbers in parenthesis supposed to be, btw? Is this
FTE? If so, e.g. Q2 accounts for 18 weeks for Gabriel, probably a bit
too much for a single quarter ;))
- Several of the things listed there will require hardware, possibly a
non-trivial amount of it. Could you make a very rough list of your
expectations so that we can plan for it, or is it too early to tell?
Regards,
Faidon