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(a)gmail.com>om>:
On Sat, Apr 15, 2023 at 7:49 AM AntiCompositeNumber
<
anticompositenumber(a)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.
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