2010/1/14 Platonides platonides@gmail.com:
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.
Obviously. Starting languages also have to be different to cover all sources.
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 would say that > 80% of TS interwiki bots, if not 100%, are running using -autonomous, as it seems that those are "launch and forget" instances. If bot owners want to run bots interactively, I dont really see how the toolserver is needed: they can just do this on their own machine. I think that the idea of the Toolserver is to have a server which is always up to be able to schedule regular processes without having to worry about your collegue shutting down your apparently inactive local box while you're away. Again, most Toolserver instances should be non-interactive instances.
I would not have any problem against users that have, for a specific reason, the need to run an _interactive_ interwiki bot instance from the Toolserver.