On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 6:07 AM, Mark A. Hershberger mah@nichework.comwrote:
On 10/01/2013 07:44 AM, Antoine Musso wrote:
The file cache is barely maintained and I am not sure whether anyone is still relying on it. We should probably remove that feature entirely and instruct people to setup a real frontend cache instead.
While this is a nice thought, it is completely unreasonable for the majority of wikis out there who use shared hosting.
We should find a way to maintain these bits that WMF doesn't use.
We've been moving away from being friendly to old-style shared-hosting servers for some time with key features that people are going to expect to replicate on their MediaWikis in the future...
* Lua templates * VE and Parsoid * Math next-generation version migrating to using a web service instead of a shell-out * ???
I'd recommend starting to deprecate support for 'shared PHP web host' environments altogether in favor of either custom installations or virtual machines -- VMs are both more flexible and easier to install.
That might not be something we can do immediately, but we should strongly think about planning that way for the future.
(I also strongly recommend having an official MediaWiki hosting & support service, with ad- and ad-free options, various degrees of customization vs automated service, etc. This'd cover a huge portion of the "I just need to stick a wiki somewhere" cases that are probably ending up on shared hosting because people don't have money for better hosting and/or the experience to run their own VM.)
-- brion