On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 2:05 PM, Marcus Buck wiki@marcusbuck.org wrote:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2008-October/039861.html
There I read: "hopefully in few weeks time we will finish the whole migration". That was four months ago. Aryeh Gregor mentioned two other posts, that spoke about "some hardware issues" and "I *think* we are in process of ordering some more RAM". Why is it so hard to get some precise answers? What are the hardware issues, when was the RAM ordered, when will it be installed? Sometimes I am under the impression, that our developers (not the volunteer developers, but the paid tech staff who do the ordering and all that stuff) do not even read wikitech-l. According to http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff: Brion Vibber, Tim Starling, Tomasz Finc, Ariel Glenn, Rob Halsell, Mark Bergsma, Michael Dale, Trevor Parscal.
I'm not entirely sure why you think that the technical staff need to report operational minutiae to you. If you wanted to know the status of getting Lucene 2.1 on small projects, perhaps it would be prudent to send a mailing list post asking what the status was, rather than a rant about "discrimination" against smaller projects. If you make an explicit request for information, there's no reason to suspect it won't be answered in a reasonable amount of time. If you lecture people about ignoring small projects, and bury your questions in that lecture, you are less likely to get a response.
It isn't that the technical staff don't care, it's just that Lucene 2.1 on smaller projects is one of a billion other things that tech staff need to work on, and without minimising the importance of other languages to Wikipedia's core mission, some quick stats show that about 70-80% of all hits come in English, German and French (totally arbitrary, tainted with Western selection bias, three big languages).
It should also be noted that, of those staff, only Brion, Tim, Rob, Mark, and to an extent Tomasz are involved in these sorts of operations matters. The rest are software developers.
Therefore, while you should, by all means, request information as to the status of certain operations things like this -- but posting outraged lectures on the importance of small languages isn't at all productive. You should split the problem up into its constituent problems, which are all separate (the Toolserver, Lucene, and query pages on small wikis), and try to have each dealt with by itself, rather than trying to lump it all together as a laundry list of complaints. You will have much better success in achieving your aims if you present your problems in this way.
Andrew Garrett