On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 10:51 PM, Ori Livneh ori@wikimedia.org wrote:
Ok, understood. Keeping it around costs little. Dan, in case you were volunteering, please go ahead and document the purpose of test2 on its main page and/or wikitech -- I think it is a good idea.
If it is cheap to keep it, why did I even bother asking? I'm glad you asked!
As the Wikimedia software stack evolves, some of its components become vestigial. Their existence makes it harder for anyone to form a systematic understanding of the whole, because they don't have any clear functional relationships with others components. And since they're not on anybody's mind, they have a tendency to become "gotchas" for future upgrades and migrations. So it's good to get rid of them, even if the resource costs are small.
Hi Ori,
Thanks for bringing this seemingly vestigial weirdness to our attention. As you say, it should be documented better.
As I'm reading this, you are still making the case that we should still shut this down. Given the amount of mailing list traffic this has generated, not everyone agrees. Rather than continuing this conversation on wikitech-l, could you file a Phab task for this (e.g. "Decommission test2.wikipedia.org"), and direct the conversation there? That will help people who care about this topic not only have a more focused audience for their comments, but will also give us a good way of tracking all of the things Phab tasks typically track (e.g. owner, priority, dependencies, resolution)
Rob