On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 11:25 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Hi.
OTRS (https://ticket.wikimedia.org/) is a critical piece of Wikimedia's infrastructure. It currently handles nearly all customer service inquiries directed at Wikimedia. Trusted volunteers triage and respond to this e-mail.
Wikimedia is currently running OTRS version 2.4. The most recently released OTRS version is 3.2. There's been an outstanding request to update Wikimedia's OTRS installation for just shy of three years now: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/22622. OTRS' inventor kindly offered to donate his time to help with an upgrade, but due to a number of factors, this has become an untenable solution.
Given the bug's fast-approaching birthday, the security concerns of running outdated software, the Wikimedia Foundation apparently being overburdened and uninterested in maintaining this piece of software, and mounting volunteer frustration, I'm wondering whether this is an area where the Wikimedia chapters or some other group might be able to lend a hand in supporting the maintenance of this piece of important infrastructure. Broadly, the Wikimedia Foundation isn't acting on this issue and it seems to have little interest in maintaining or supporting this software any longer.
Given recent discussion about various Wikimedia movement roles, I'm wondering whether a Wikimedia chapter or a grant or some other movement player could either take on supporting the existing OTRS installation (by hiring a contractor), evaluating and implementing better/different response software, and/or moving the response system elsewhere.
MZMcBride
I've been working on OTRS since 2008 and have been an OTRS administrator for much of that time. As somebody who devotes a lot of his time to OTRS-related work, I'm extremely disappointed in the lack of support the OTRS team has been dealing with. As MZMcBride points out, there are a number of reasons why the software needs to be updated.
Last year, we handled roughly 40,000 general inquiries in over 35 languages.[1] This alone should be a convincing reason as to why we should have at least somewhat up-to-date software, clean of security issues and other problems.[2]
While I realize that there have been other priorities, I would have thought that with 3 years of waiting, eventually OTRS would be important enough for somebody to give some much needed attention to.
[1] - https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/01/24/the-incredible-work-of-the-wikimedia-v... [2] - https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASS...
+1, the interface still confuses me at somepoints today.
But I have to ask, are we getting everything we need with an OTRS update to the new version, or are we settling for a medioker (excuse my spelling, it is late). Is it a better idea to have wikimedians (maybe through grants, idk) build something open source and cc-whatever? That way fixes can be made and we can get many devs (broad sense of the term) fixing bugs of a new system.
DeltaQuad - Mobile phone English Wikipedia Administrator and Checkuser On Feb 20, 2013 11:35 PM, "Rjd0060" rjd0060.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 11:25 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Hi.
OTRS (https://ticket.wikimedia.org/) is a critical piece of
Wikimedia's
infrastructure. It currently handles nearly all customer service
inquiries
directed at Wikimedia. Trusted volunteers triage and respond to this e-mail.
Wikimedia is currently running OTRS version 2.4. The most recently released OTRS version is 3.2. There's been an outstanding request to
update
Wikimedia's OTRS installation for just shy of three years now: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/22622. OTRS' inventor kindly offered to donate his time to help with an upgrade, but due to a number of factors, this has become an untenable solution.
Given the bug's fast-approaching birthday, the security concerns of running outdated software, the Wikimedia Foundation apparently being overburdened and uninterested in maintaining this piece of software, and mounting volunteer frustration, I'm wondering whether this is an area where the Wikimedia chapters or some other group might be able to lend a hand in supporting the maintenance of this piece of important infrastructure. Broadly, the Wikimedia Foundation isn't acting on this issue and it seems to have little interest in maintaining or supporting this software any longer.
Given recent discussion about various Wikimedia movement roles, I'm wondering whether a Wikimedia chapter or a grant or some other movement player could either take on supporting the existing OTRS installation (by hiring a contractor), evaluating and implementing better/different response software, and/or moving the response system elsewhere.
MZMcBride
I've been working on OTRS since 2008 and have been an OTRS administrator for much of that time. As somebody who devotes a lot of his time to OTRS-related work, I'm extremely disappointed in the lack of support the OTRS team has been dealing with. As MZMcBride points out, there are a number of reasons why the software needs to be updated.
Last year, we handled roughly 40,000 general inquiries in over 35 languages.[1] This alone should be a convincing reason as to why we should have at least somewhat up-to-date software, clean of security issues and other problems.[2]
While I realize that there have been other priorities, I would have thought that with 3 years of waiting, eventually OTRS would be important enough for somebody to give some much needed attention to.
[1] -
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/01/24/the-incredible-work-of-the-wikimedia-v... [2] -
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASS...
--
Ryan User:Rjd0060 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 12:18 AM, DeltaQuad Wikipedia deltaquadwiki@gmail.com wrote:
Is it a better idea to have wikimedians (maybe through grants, idk) build something open source and cc-whatever? That way fixes can be made and we can get many devs (broad sense of the term) fixing bugs of a new system.
OTRS is open source. The letters "OTRS" themselves stand for "Open-source ticket request system".
I offered to look into this some time last year, and apply for a grant to write an up to date piece of software. However it didn't get a good response, with the foundation promising an OTRS update early this year... apparent progress was made at that point, but it petered out very quickly.
Tom
On 21 February 2013 05:18, DeltaQuad Wikipedia deltaquadwiki@gmail.comwrote:
+1, the interface still confuses me at somepoints today.
But I have to ask, are we getting everything we need with an OTRS update to the new version, or are we settling for a medioker (excuse my spelling, it is late). Is it a better idea to have wikimedians (maybe through grants, idk) build something open source and cc-whatever? That way fixes can be made and we can get many devs (broad sense of the term) fixing bugs of a new system.
DeltaQuad - Mobile phone English Wikipedia Administrator and Checkuser On Feb 20, 2013 11:35 PM, "Rjd0060" rjd0060.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 11:25 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Hi.
OTRS (https://ticket.wikimedia.org/) is a critical piece of
Wikimedia's
infrastructure. It currently handles nearly all customer service
inquiries
directed at Wikimedia. Trusted volunteers triage and respond to this e-mail.
Wikimedia is currently running OTRS version 2.4. The most recently released OTRS version is 3.2. There's been an outstanding request to
update
Wikimedia's OTRS installation for just shy of three years now: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/22622. OTRS' inventor kindly offered
to
donate his time to help with an upgrade, but due to a number of
factors,
this has become an untenable solution.
Given the bug's fast-approaching birthday, the security concerns of running outdated software, the Wikimedia Foundation apparently being overburdened and uninterested in maintaining this piece of software,
and
mounting volunteer frustration, I'm wondering whether this is an area where the Wikimedia chapters or some other group might be able to lend
a
hand in supporting the maintenance of this piece of important infrastructure. Broadly, the Wikimedia Foundation isn't acting on this issue and it seems to have little interest in maintaining or supporting this software any longer.
Given recent discussion about various Wikimedia movement roles, I'm wondering whether a Wikimedia chapter or a grant or some other movement player could either take on supporting the existing OTRS installation
(by
hiring a contractor), evaluating and implementing better/different response software, and/or moving the response system elsewhere.
MZMcBride
I've been working on OTRS since 2008 and have been an OTRS administrator for much of that time. As somebody who devotes a lot of his time to OTRS-related work, I'm extremely disappointed in the lack of support the OTRS team has been dealing with. As MZMcBride points out, there are a number of reasons why the software needs to be updated.
Last year, we handled roughly 40,000 general inquiries in over 35 languages.[1] This alone should be a convincing reason as to why we
should
have at least somewhat up-to-date software, clean of security issues and other problems.[2]
While I realize that there have been other priorities, I would have
thought
that with 3 years of waiting, eventually OTRS would be important enough
for
somebody to give some much needed attention to.
[1] -
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/01/24/the-incredible-work-of-the-wikimedia-v...
[2] -
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASS...
--
Ryan User:Rjd0060 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 11:34 PM, Rjd0060 rjd0060.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 11:25 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Hi.
OTRS (https://ticket.wikimedia.org/) is a critical piece of Wikimedia's infrastructure. It currently handles nearly all customer service inquiries directed at Wikimedia. Trusted volunteers triage and respond to this e-mail.
Wikimedia is currently running OTRS version 2.4. The most recently released OTRS version is 3.2. There's been an outstanding request to update Wikimedia's OTRS installation for just shy of three years now: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/22622. OTRS' inventor kindly offered to donate his time to help with an upgrade, but due to a number of factors, this has become an untenable solution.
Given the bug's fast-approaching birthday, the security concerns of running outdated software, the Wikimedia Foundation apparently being overburdened and uninterested in maintaining this piece of software, and mounting volunteer frustration, I'm wondering whether this is an area where the Wikimedia chapters or some other group might be able to lend a hand in supporting the maintenance of this piece of important infrastructure. Broadly, the Wikimedia Foundation isn't acting on this issue and it seems to have little interest in maintaining or supporting this software any longer.
Given recent discussion about various Wikimedia movement roles, I'm wondering whether a Wikimedia chapter or a grant or some other movement player could either take on supporting the existing OTRS installation (by hiring a contractor), evaluating and implementing better/different response software, and/or moving the response system elsewhere.
MZMcBride
I've been working on OTRS since 2008 and have been an OTRS administrator for much of that time. As somebody who devotes a lot of his time to OTRS-related work, I'm extremely disappointed in the lack of support the OTRS team has been dealing with. As MZMcBride points out, there are a number of reasons why the software needs to be updated.
To clarify, the Foundation support that would be appreciated here is from the tech/ops group. We've had good response from other staff on related issues, and that is much appreciated.
On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 11:36 PM, Rjd0060 rjd0060.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
To clarify, the Foundation support that would be appreciated here is from the tech/ops group. We've had good response from other staff on related issues, and that is much appreciated.
--
Ryan User:Rjd0060
To clarify even further, from my perspective:
I've been an Volunteer Response Team agent since 2009, and a leader (OTRS admin) since 2010. In that time the control of OTRS moved from a function that had a designated staff role of "control" to one of community management. In the past two and a half years Philippe has been our contact for support from the Wikimedia Foundation, and he has done a fantastic job supporting myself and the time with advice and Foundation resources as they have been gathered. Over the past year, Maggie Dennis has transitioned into this role as the Foundation rep for OTRS. She has done an equally wonderful job in being proactive and helping us with our thoughts and needs.
I would in no way construe the support we've gotten from LCA than anything less than they have to give as far as they have been able to get us.
Yes, that is a very long sentence.
Keegan Peterzell wrote:
I've been an Volunteer Response Team agent since 2009, and a leader (OTRS admin) since 2010. In that time the control of OTRS moved from a function that had a designated staff role of "control" to one of community management. In the past two and a half years Philippe has been our contact for support from the Wikimedia Foundation, and he has done a fantastic job supporting myself and the time with advice and Foundation resources as they have been gathered. Over the past year, Maggie Dennis has transitioned into this role as the Foundation rep for OTRS. She has done an equally wonderful job in being proactive and helping us with our thoughts and needs.
I don't have much interaction with either on a daily basis, but I can certainly say that it seems to be purely in terms of technical (software) support where we're seeing an issue right now. The non-technical support has been great, particularly since Maggie joined, from what I'm told.
But OTRS is ultimately a big piece of software. Maybe the Wikimedia Foundation can buy a support contract for it if nobody is willing/able to support/maintain it internally? Or maybe that's something a chapter or grant could do? Dunno. I think any option is on the table right now.
This also isn't a criticism of the Wikimedia Foundation engineering folks. They've got plenty on their plate as well, of course. But _somebody_ has to be supporting the technical portion of OTRS. If the Wikimedia Foundation can't/won't, someone else has to step in. That's where I thought the chapters or another movement player might be an option.
Gregory Varnum wrote:
This could be a good project for one of the developing MediaWiki Groups. MediaWiki Group San Francisco is already approved by AffCom and eligible for grants.
If they're willing to make a commitment to support it for at least a few years (you don't really want to be moving infrastructure around all the time, I don't think), I think this is workable. It's just a matter of pointing where the e-mail is sent, as I understand it. And then maintaining whatever solution you pick/build that manages the e-mail.
MZMcBride
On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 12:02 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
But OTRS is ultimately a big piece of software. Maybe the Wikimedia Foundation can buy a support contract for it if nobody is willing/able to support/maintain it internally? Or maybe that's something a chapter or grant could do? Dunno. I think any option is on the table right now.
This also isn't a criticism of the Wikimedia Foundation engineering folks. They've got plenty on their plate as well, of course. But _somebody_ has to be supporting the technical portion of OTRS. If the Wikimedia Foundation can't/won't, someone else has to step in. That's where I thought the chapters or another movement player might be an option.
Absolutely agree with the sentiment.
On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 1:02 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
This also isn't a criticism of the Wikimedia Foundation engineering folks. They've got plenty on their plate as well, of course. But _somebody_ has to be supporting the technical portion of OTRS. If the Wikimedia Foundation can't/won't, someone else has to step in. That's where I thought the chapters or another movement player might be an option.
Does anyone know what the status is of the OTRS project on Labs? Given a contact, I'd be happy to do what I can to help; I have some limited experience configuring/deploying OTRS (up until the end of the 3.0 branch last year, nothing with 3.1 or 3.2 unfortunately).
I think opportunities for *volunteer* help have to consciously be maximized, especially for volunteers who are or are willing to be agents and/or identified to the Foundation. It's not going to get done otherwise.
-Madman/ea
On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 9:47 PM, Keegan Peterzell keegan.wiki@gmail.comwrote:
On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 11:36 PM, Rjd0060 rjd0060.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
To clarify, the Foundation support that would be appreciated here is from the tech/ops group. We've had good response from other staff on related issues, and that is much appreciated.
--
Ryan User:Rjd0060
To clarify even further, from my perspective:
I've been an Volunteer Response Team agent since 2009, and a leader (OTRS admin) since 2010. In that time the control of OTRS moved from a function that had a designated staff role of "control" to one of community management. In the past two and a half years Philippe has been our contact for support from the Wikimedia Foundation, and he has done a fantastic job supporting myself and the time with advice and Foundation resources as they have been gathered. Over the past year, Maggie Dennis has transitioned into this role as the Foundation rep for OTRS. She has done an equally wonderful job in being proactive and helping us with our thoughts and needs.
I would in no way construe the support we've gotten from LCA than anything less than they have to give as far as they have been able to get us.
Yes, that is a very long sentence.
-- ~Keegan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan _______________________________________________
Yeah, I have to agree sadly that we need more tech support and this has been a thing that has been ongoing for a while. I personally think it should remain in the foundation for many reasons (the least of which is relatively large legal reasons) but we REALLY need to focus on it, or a replacement, more.
OTRS is the public face of not only the projects but the foundation in general and answers an absolutely insane amount of email every year and that has been the case for a while. When I first started applying to work at the foundation my big interview ended up being about 8 hours (with a liquor break in the middle) explaining to Philippe how I thought OTRS needed to be replaced. I thought, and continue to think, that the system underserves the job and we would be better served with something else that could take much better advantage of modern advancements and clarity in purpose.
Sadly at the time they didn't have the money for me to work on OTRS (and so I came to do the fundraiser) and since then I have heard rumors of it's upgrade or replacement every single year (multiple times) only to be told later that the resources aren't available. I've seen us look at the upgrade multiple times, I've heard it be called both new "ceiling wax and cake frosting" but not necessarily called a good option. It may be, I don't know and we (as usual with outside products) overwork it beyond measure. Even the professional OTRS folks when we were talking to them about helping upgrade basically said "errr, you have HOW much in the database?" and told us to just abandon it and start fresh with their new version. That said even their internal OTRS version wasn't upgraded yet last year ....
We need to do something though, it is disappointing to me that it hasn't been a bigger priority because I think it should have been and I think it should be now. I'm not sure if an OTRS upgrade is the best option... but it is probably better then what we have. For a long while I thought we should wait and not upgrade so that we can just replace it... but clearly it's been too long for that now.
James
This conversation should shift to meta sooner rather than later. I'm not on my PC, but perhaps /Talk:OTRS/Software?
~ Keegan
Keegan Peterzell wrote:
This conversation should shift to meta sooner rather than later. I'm not on my PC, but perhaps /Talk:OTRS/Software?
I'm not sure moving to Meta-Wiki is a good idea. "OTRS" is the current software. It's unclear what a "Software" talk subpage would be used for.
I'm inclined to say that whoever steps up and makes a commitment to support a ticket response system can pick whether to stick with OTRS or move to a different system, as long as it's comparable to (or better than) OTRS.
James' post offered a lot of insight into why this has been so slow-moving. (Thank you, James!) But at this point it seems fairly clear that someone needs to become responsible for the technical support of OTRS or its successor. I'm not sure Meta-Wiki can help with that. It seems more like an organization issue.
James Alexander wrote:
Yeah, I have to agree sadly that we need more tech support and this has been a thing that has been ongoing for a while. I personally think it should remain in the foundation for many reasons (the least of which is relatively large legal reasons) but we REALLY need to focus on it, or a replacement, more.
I would think the Wikimedia Foundation would want to remain pretty distant from unfiltered volunteer replies to e-mails, from a legal standpoint, but maybe someone from the Wikimedia Foundation legal team can chime in on this point.
Thanks again for your post. Some of the background info in particular was enlightening.
MZMcBride
On 21 February 2013 19:02, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
I'm not sure moving to Meta-Wiki is a good idea. "OTRS" is the current software. It's unclear what a "Software" talk subpage would be used for.
I understood him to mean that we should move the *discussion* to meta - not the handling of the emails themselves.
On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 2:12 AM, Liam Wyatt liamwyatt@gmail.com wrote:
On 21 February 2013 19:02, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
I'm not sure moving to Meta-Wiki is a good idea. "OTRS" is the current software. It's unclear what a "Software" talk subpage would be used for.
I understood him to mean that we should move the *discussion* to meta - not the handling of the emails themselves.
That.
On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 6:02 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
James Alexander wrote:
Yeah, I have to agree sadly that we need more tech support and this has been a thing that has been ongoing for a while. I personally think it should remain in the foundation for many reasons (the least of which is relatively large legal reasons) but we REALLY need to focus on it, or a replacement, more.
I would think the Wikimedia Foundation would want to remain pretty distant from unfiltered volunteer replies to e-mails, from a legal standpoint, but maybe someone from the Wikimedia Foundation legal team can chime in on this point.
Thanks again for your post. Some of the background info in particular was enlightening.
As long as there is a NDA (or such) in place, It would be fine, No different than having one of the OTRS devs work on it (see the bz report about updates).
On 21/02/13 07:19, [[w:en:User:Madman]] wrote:
Does anyone know what the status is of the OTRS project on Labs? Given a contact, I'd be happy to do what I can to help; I have some limited experience configuring/deploying OTRS (up until the end of the 3.0 branch last year, nothing with 3.1 or 3.2 unfortunately).
I think opportunities for *volunteer* help have to consciously be maximized, especially for volunteers who are or are willing to be agents and/or identified to the Foundation. It's not going to get done otherwise.
-Madman/ea
I don't see much future in that, sadly. Yes, a puppetization from a volunteer could help the WMF, however they won't give you access to the current setup that you would be replicating. And that's a point that has been barring any volunteer help for years on this topic. Only ops can work on it, but nobody is assigned to otrs, and they have other tasks. There's a mixture of technical needs, legal issues and too-risky-to-touch it. Then Martin Edenhofer appeared offering to help with it, but there was delay after dealy: a NDA is needed, then separate machines, later he needs to provide the ssh key... And no work is done.
On 21/02/13 07:32, James Alexander wrote:
Yeah, I have to agree sadly that we need more tech support and this has been a thing that has been ongoing for a while. I personally think it should remain in the foundation for many reasons (the least of which is relatively large legal reasons) but we REALLY need to focus on it, or a replacement, more.
OTRS is the public face of not only the projects but the foundation in general and answers an absolutely insane amount of email every year and that has been the case for a while. When I first started applying to work at the foundation my big interview ended up being about 8 hours (with a liquor break in the middle) explaining to Philippe how I thought OTRS needed to be replaced. I thought, and continue to think, that the system underserves the job and we would be better served with something else that could take much better advantage of modern advancements and clarity in purpose.
Sadly at the time they didn't have the money for me to work on OTRS (and so I came to do the fundraiser) and since then I have heard rumors of it's upgrade or replacement every single year (multiple times) only to be told later that the resources aren't available. I've seen us look at the upgrade multiple times, I've heard it be called both new "ceiling wax and cake frosting" but not necessarily called a good option. It may be, I don't know and we (as usual with outside products) overwork it beyond measure. Even the professional OTRS folks when we were talking to them about helping upgrade basically said "errr, you have HOW much in the database?" and told us to just abandon it and start fresh with their new version. That said even their internal OTRS version wasn't upgraded yet last year ....
We need to do something though, it is disappointing to me that it hasn't been a bigger priority because I think it should have been and I think it should be now. I'm not sure if an OTRS upgrade is the best option... but it is probably better then what we have. For a long while I thought we should wait and not upgrade so that we can just replace it... but clearly it's been too long for that now.
James
Thanks for your insight, James. It's very interesting. As you have dealt with it, can you clarify why is the upgrade such a big problem? Yes, we have tons of emails. So what? Does the upgrade use O(2^N) operations?? Even if not-too-efficient, I would expect the upgrade to have finished in three years :) I don't even know about a test upgrade being performed ever.
I agree that OTRS is kind-of inefficient. We could easily build a replacement in 1-2 months *keeping the old data*. If OTRS works quite well on a single server, just imagine what we could do in a multiple server setup. I find hard that such version would perform worse. Not to mention the “handy” improvements we could add based on our usage. But just a newer OTRS version would be an improvement.
Martin has answered my email and just left a comment on https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22622. I'll get him in touch with Sumana via E-Mail.
Hope this helps, best regards, Nicole
On 21 February 2013 21:37, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
On 21/02/13 07:19, [[w:en:User:Madman]] wrote:
Does anyone know what the status is of the OTRS project on Labs? Given a contact, I'd be happy to do what I can to help; I have some limited experience configuring/deploying OTRS (up until the end of the 3.0 branch last year, nothing with 3.1 or 3.2 unfortunately).
I think opportunities for *volunteer* help have to consciously be maximized, especially for volunteers who are or are willing to be agents and/or identified to the Foundation. It's not going to get done otherwise.
-Madman/ea
I don't see much future in that, sadly. Yes, a puppetization from a volunteer could help the WMF, however they won't give you access to the current setup that you would be replicating. And that's a point that has been barring any volunteer help for years on this topic. Only ops can work on it, but nobody is assigned to otrs, and they have other tasks. There's a mixture of technical needs, legal issues and too-risky-to-touch it. Then Martin Edenhofer appeared offering to help with it, but there was delay after dealy: a NDA is needed, then separate machines, later he needs to provide the ssh key... And no work is done.
On 21/02/13 07:32, James Alexander wrote:
Yeah, I have to agree sadly that we need more tech support and this has been a thing that has been ongoing for a while. I personally think it should remain in the foundation for many reasons (the least of which is relatively large legal reasons) but we REALLY need to focus on it, or a replacement, more.
OTRS is the public face of not only the projects but the foundation in general and answers an absolutely insane amount of email every year and that has been the case for a while. When I first started applying to work at the foundation my big interview ended up being about 8 hours (with a liquor break in the middle) explaining to Philippe how I thought OTRS needed to be replaced. I thought, and continue to think, that the system underserves the job and we would be better served with something else that could take much better advantage of modern advancements and clarity in purpose.
Sadly at the time they didn't have the money for me to work on OTRS (and so I came to do the fundraiser) and since then I have heard rumors of it's upgrade or replacement every single year (multiple times) only to be told later that the resources aren't available. I've seen us look at the upgrade multiple times, I've heard it be called both new "ceiling wax and cake frosting" but not necessarily called a good option. It may be, I don't know and we (as usual with outside products) overwork it beyond measure. Even the professional OTRS folks when we were talking to them about helping upgrade basically said "errr, you have HOW much in the database?" and told us to just abandon it and start fresh with their new version. That said even their internal OTRS version wasn't upgraded yet last year ....
We need to do something though, it is disappointing to me that it hasn't been a bigger priority because I think it should have been and I think it should be now. I'm not sure if an OTRS upgrade is the best option... but it is probably better then what we have. For a long while I thought we should wait and not upgrade so that we can just replace it... but clearly it's been too long for that now.
James
Thanks for your insight, James. It's very interesting. As you have dealt with it, can you clarify why is the upgrade such a big problem? Yes, we have tons of emails. So what? Does the upgrade use O(2^N) operations?? Even if not-too-efficient, I would expect the upgrade to have finished in three years :) I don't even know about a test upgrade being performed ever.
I agree that OTRS is kind-of inefficient. We could easily build a replacement in 1-2 months *keeping the old data*. If OTRS works quite well on a single server, just imagine what we could do in a multiple server setup. I find hard that such version would perform worse. Not to mention the “handy” improvements we could add based on our usage. But just a newer OTRS version would be an improvement.
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