Hello, At Saturday 27 April 2013 17:19:29 DaB. wrote:
To cut a long story short: I am not sure what you expect me to do in this situation. Please clarify! I don't want to deal with a task without a clear task.
as a WMDE-member and toolserver-admin I would like to answer you.
I expect you to represent the toolserver against your boss, Pavel. And I expect that you do it in favor of the toolserver and get us as much support (in money, man-power and other things) as possible. I also expect you that you can differ between the part of your job that should help the toolserver and the part of your job that has the goal to destroy the toolserver; I do expect you to not do propaganda for Labs or ToolLabs (neutral information is ok).
The goal of the toolserver is to help the Wikimedia-projects with tools. For this it provides a stable place for tool-authors for hosting their tools (before the toolserver tool-author had to host their stuff themself). There is no limit for this, because the Wikimedia-Projects have no limit too and continue to grow. The tool-authors expect that the toolserver is (more or less) stable, free, fast, maintained and that they will get help if needed. They do not like downtimes, replags, changing of rules and to document their stuff. Somewhere in the middle is the toolserver (we are free, somewhere stable, not very fast, more or less maintained, offer help if possible, have downtimes, much replag from time to time and change our rules sparely). Your job is to help to move the toolserver nearer to the expectations of the users with buying hardware for the toolserver (for fastness and against replag) and hire admins (for offering help and do maintenance). Every investment in the toolserver is a good investment because it helps the Wikimedia-projects. And it doesn't matter for how long the toolserver will exists – if you hire a person for 1 year that's more expensive than 1 server and after the year you have the hardware as a bonus.
And no, there was never a plan how the toolserver should grow; we always played by ear used how little money we had. In a ideal world WMDE would had read the toolserver-mailinglist and, if the complements of tool-authors increased, asked the admins how the cluster can be extended (in a VERY ideal world WMDE would had read the Wikipedia looking for complements of tool- USERS). But this is not a ideal world – but WMDE wasn't able to help even if the admins ASKED themself. So why creating a long-time-plan if WMDE is not able to fix even short-time-problems?
To conclude this mail I come back to "exceptions" in the form what I expect from WMDE: Nothing. I do not think anymore that WMDE has the goal to support the toolserver. All WMDE cares for is to move the tools (with or without tool- authors) to Labs as fast as possible, investing as few as it can in the toolserver, and shutdown the toolserver as early as possible.
Sincerely, DaB.
P.S: And I understand that it is just your job.