Hi Jesse!

On 20.03.2011 11:07, Jesse (Pathoschild) wrote:

Hello,

I'm moving some external tools to the Toolserver. I have some questions to help decide which tools are appropriate.

1. The terms of use https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Rules prohibit "large web

applications"; does this prevent the use of an MVC framework like Kohana http://kohanaframework.org/ to serve tool pages? The framework has a fairly low footprint, is maintained by an active community, and provides some nice security features (like rule-based input validation http://kohanaframework.org/3.1/guide/kohana/security/validation) which I'd like to use in my scripts. I plan to use some URL-rewriting to serve the pages, so there's no direct access to the underlying framework or MVC files.

WebApp frameworks are a bit of a grey area. I'd suggest to request installation of the framework for all users. It would become part of the TS install base, would receive regular updates (if there are distribution bundles), etc.

2. The terms require that tools "be related to a designated affiliate project".

Does this prevent small general-use tools useful to Wikimedians, like regular expression manipulation or set operations?

As long as the tool is useful to Wikimedia Projects (or OpenStreetMap), it's fone on the TS. It's not a problem if it's useful to others too. The only exception I can imagine would be "outside" use creating considerable stress on the server. In that case, the "gerneral" service should probably move to some other place.

-- daniel