lcrocker@nupedia.com wrote:
This gives us an opportunity, and I'd like to suggest a course of action here and see what the group thinks (especially Jimbo if he's reading, and Jason).
I'm reading. I'm here at my new residence, but all packed in boxes. And I'm reading on a slow modem. I'll be back to full speed on Monday.
days myself, but the only way to get good testing is the foist it upon the Wikipedia community at large.
I'm afraid you're right. But the last time we did this to them, they quite rightfully freaked and wanted to know why we didn't test more. This is a dilemma, there is no good answer.
One thing we should do is make sure that the new software is a look and feel clone of what we have now, minus a few bugs. Ordinary active users who aren't paying attention to technical stuff should hopefully not even realize what we've done to them.
If the transition fails immediately, we just abandon it and go back to the old server, and try again later. If it succeeds initially, but after a few days we dicover something drastically wrong, we can still go back to the old server, updating the database with the changes of those few days (for which I have prepared a script). If everything goes well, then after a week or two Bomis can recycle the old server and we're upand running.
Jimbo, Jason, I also went ahead and installed MySQL/PHP/Apache on the new server from source (after testing all of them on my server first-- and yes, that includes this week's Apache security fix). My notes on exactly what I did are in /home/lee/src/README on the server, and the sources are in /usr/local/src. Please review the installation and see if it's what you had in mind, or let me know what differences you envision. I would also like your feedback on any details of the wiki software installation you have in mind (directories, etc.)
Excellent. I'll probably make some symlinks to suit my own personal idiosyncracies, such as /apache and /home/wiki/work-http/, etc., if you've done it differently. I won't ever *code* those, though, so they shouldn't affect anyone else.
--Jimbo