On Jan 16, 2015, at 11:27 AM, Ryan Lane
<rlane32(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 4:29 AM, David Gerard
<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 16 January 2015 at 07:38, Chad
<innocentkiller(a)gmail.com> wrote:
These days I'm not convinced it's our job to support every possible
scale of wiki install. There's several simpler and smaller wiki solutions
for people who can't do more than FTP a few files to a folder.
In this case the problem is leaving users and their wiki content
unsupported. Because they won't move while it "works", even as it
becomes a Swiss cheese of security holes. Because their content is
important to them.
This is the part of the mission that involves everyone else producing
the sum of human knowledge. They used our software, if we're
abandoning them then don't pretend there's a viable alternative for
them. You know there isn't.
What you're forgetting is that WMF abandoned
MediaWiki as an Open Source
project quite a while ago (at least 2 years ago). There's a separate org
that gets a grant from WMF to handle third party use, and it's funded just
well enough to keep the lights on.
Take a look at the current state of MediaWiki on the internet. I'd be
surprised if less than 99% of the MediaWiki wikis in existence are out of
date. Most are probably running a version from years ago. The level of
effort required to upgrade MediaWiki and its extensions that don't list
compatibility with core versions is past the skill level of most people
that use the software. Even places with a dedicated ops team find MediaWiki
difficult to keep up to date. Hell, I find it difficult and I worked for
WMF on the ops team and have been a MediaWiki dev since 1.3.
I don't think adding a couple more services is going to drastically alter
the current situation.
- Ryan
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This sounds like a problem we need to fix, rather than making it worse. I'd most wikis
are not up to date then we should work on making it easier to keep up to date, not making
it harder. Any SOA approach is sadly DOA for any shared host; even if the user has shell
access or other means of launching processes (so excluding almost every free host in
existence here), there is no guarantee that a particular environment such as node.js or
Python is installed or at the correct version (and similarly no guarantee for a host to
install them for you). Such a move, while possibly ideal for the WMF, would indeed make
running on shared hosting nearly if not entirely impossible. The net effect is that people
will keep their existing MW installs at their current version or even install old versions
of the software so they can look like Wikipedia or whatnot, rife with unpatched security
vulnerabilities. I cannot fathom that the WMF would be ok with leaving third-party users
in such a situation.
Moving advanced things into services may make sense, but it should not come at the expense
of making the core worthless for third parties; sensible refactors could still be done on
core while leaving it as pure PHP. Services, if implemented, should be entirely optional
(as an example, Parsoid is not required to have a base working wiki. I would like to stick
to that model for any future service as well).
Regards,
Ryan Schmidt