There always be gaps in ownership and there will be some critical software left to individuals to keep the lights on. It's an ideal we need to move towards but we might never reach.
That being said, it really doesn't need to be this bad.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of critical tech currently in production without any maintainers:
- All of the authorization stack (2FA, Central Auth (otherwise known as SUL), authentication in mw, OAuth, etc.) - All of the multimedia stack (from upload, to the video player, to the mw file backend, media handler, metadata extraction, etc.) - FlaggedRevs aka Pending changes, a critical tool in the workflow of patrollers - Abusefilter, the tool that prevents vandalism from being saved. I can't stress how important this is. - SecurePoll, critical to community resilience. - Deletion workflow - Mailman (mailing lists), the very same infra that is sending and storing this email. - User preferences - Gadgets infra - Beta cluster: The most important human testing infra before bugs hit production. - SpamBlacklist/TitleBlacklist
You can go and check: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developers/Maintainers and https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/board/3144/query/open/ to see frustrations and open requests for years.
And even if a software would have an owner, it used to be that the team was under so much pressure to produce new things instead of maintenance that the software would practically be without a maintainer (or worse, as even volunteers couldn't unofficially take the role). I can example a few.
Am Mo., 17. Apr. 2023 um 02:51 Uhr schrieb Gergő Tisza gtisza@gmail.com:
On Sat, Apr 15, 2023 at 7:49 AM AntiCompositeNumber < anticompositenumber@gmail.com> wrote:
Agreed. It has long been the case that infrastructure critical to the operation of the various wikis has been left without a clear maintainer, or has been maintained only in the volunteer time of a single staffer already fulfilling a full-time role. Teams would be dissolved or reassigned to completely different projects after completion, without the ability and/or willingness to even review patches. That assumes that the team doing the work wasn't made up of contractors who departed the Foundation when the project was "completed", taking their knowledge of it with them.
This was a major factor in causing the technical debt problem, and must be addressed to have any chance of solving it.
At some point we will have to admit that we have created a feature set many times larger than we have the capacity to actively maintain and improve. Either we make software development cheaper somehow (move the WMF to Romania or something), or we cut some of the non-software spending (but we already spend 50%+ of movement funds on software, and we'd have to increase capacity way more than by a factor of two to maintain all our code), or we undeploy most current features, or we'll have to put up with most things being unmaintained, which is the status quo. That's not to say we can't be smarter about it (e.g. microservices are a great way to have maintenance overhead spin even more out of control) or that maintenance efforts couldn't be better prioritized (e.g. the lack of maintainership of our authentication stack is somewhat wild), but fundamentally changing the current mode of operation (where most things are deployed and then abandoned to work on the next thing) is a pipe dream IMO. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org