Here is a regular reminder that:
 - You can't throw money at a problem and expect it to be solved automatically.
 - $100M is a lot of money but 1- Not all of it goes to personnel, especially engineering personnel. 2- It's not that much money compared to the rest of technology companies and their personnel expenditure especially the ones with similar scale.

On Wed, Apr 20, 2022 at 11:14 PM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <galder158@hotmail.com> wrote:
We may differ in what was first: abandoning it or closing it, but the process is available at phabricator.

Here it wais said FOUR! years ago that the service would be closed and done by PediaPress (what didn't happen): https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T184772#4116906

Here, we have a more detailed post saying that the functionality would be back: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T184772#4119731

The last details were provided 3 years ago, when it was said that the PediaPress "solution" didn't happen: https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Uxkv0ib36m3i8vol

We migh also have a different view on priorities, but a Foundation with 100 million dollars in a vault can pay for someone to solve this issue, no doubts. The problem is again that we have a vehicle, but no maintenance and no one driving it down the slope.

By the way: the Proton PDF render is also failing if the article has a gallery. But no one cares about it. It used to work, it was broken, and no one was responsible for the fail.

Sincerely

Galder


2022(e)ko api. 20(a) 17:02 erabiltzaileak hau idatzi du (Gergő Tisza <gtisza@gmail.com>):
On Tue, Apr 19, 2022 at 11:04 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <galder158@hotmail.com> wrote:
The problem is not that it was "Just one of the things that died out because no-one could be bothered to maintain it", it is worse: it was broken on purpose, and not recovered, because the WMF decided that no one cares about it.

That is patently untrue. The book renderer (OCG) was, due to the lack of maintenance, increasingly causing problems for the operators of Wikimedia production services, and the approach it was based on (converting wikitext to LaTeX) resulted in an endless stream of discrepancies in the PDF output. It was replaced with another PDF rendering service that used a headless browser - an approach that resulted in much more faithful rendering (basically it outsourced the cost of maintaining a good PDF generator to browser vendors) but didn't scale well and wouldn't have been able to handle large collections of articles.

I'm not fond of that decision but it obviously wasn't about disabling something that worked before, just for fun. The Foundation had to choose between risking platform stability, a significant time investment to modernize the service (at the detriment of other projects that time could be invested into), and shutting down a feature that saw relatively little use, and chose the third.

FWIW there was a volunteer-maintained service doing LaTeX-based multi-article book generation which might still be functional: https://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/

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Amir (he/him)