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From: Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com
To: Wikimedia Toolserver <toolserver-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Saturday, September 29, 2012 10:41 PM
Subject: Re: [Toolserver-l] Future of the toolserver
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). 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.