Andre Engels wrote:
It just seems
silly to run several interwiki-bots on the
toolserver, instead of cooperating to run one.
Still, there's the matter of what it means to 'cooperate to run one'.
Would that mean that there's only a single interwiki bot process
running? That can only work if it is fast enough to go through _all_
pages on _all_ languages in a reasonable time.
There may be several instances, but they would be the same bot.
And even then you have
only replaced the autonomous bots. Running with hints would be hard to
get in; interactively running the bot would not be possible at all
under such a scheme.
That's a valid concern.
I think better results could be reached by putting the
emphasis on the
"cooperating" part rather than the "running one" part. Get some
database or such where the bots notify when they have either updated a
page or found that it did not need updating, then have the bots
(except when running with hints or such) request this database before
doing interwiki on a page and skip it if its last notification was
less than so-and-so-much time ago (for example one week).
Several cooperating instances of the same bot running from the
toolserver can do a lot of magic sharing information and using the
tables replicated at the toolserver.