On Thu Jan 15 2015 at 11:34:58 PM Brian Wolff bawolff@gmail.com wrote:
On Jan 16, 2015 2:49 AM, "Max Semenik" maxsem.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 10:38 PM, Bryan Davis bd808@wikimedia.org
wrote:
One of the bigger questions I have about the potential shift to requiring services is the fate of shared hosting deployments of MediaWiki. What will happen to the numerous MediaWiki installs on shared hosting providers like 1and1, Dreamhost or GoDaddy when running MediaWiki requires multiple node.js/java/hack/python stand alone processes to function? Is the MediaWiki community making a conscious decision to abandon these customers? If so should we start looking for a suitable replacement that can be recommended and possibly develop tools to easy the migration away from MediaWiki to another monolithic wiki application? If not, how are we going to ensure that pure PHP alternate implementations get equal testing and feature development if they are not actively used on the Foundation's project wikis?
This is not even about shared hostings: it is pretty obvious that running
a
bunch of heterogenous services is harder than just one PHP app,
especially
if you don't have dedicated ops like we at WMF do. Therefore, the
question
is: what will we gain and what will we lose by making MediaWiki unusable
by
95% of its current user base?
-- Best regards, Max Semenik ([[User:MaxSem]])
Im quite concerned by this. Well shared hosting might be on the decline, I still feel like most third part users dont have the competence to do much more than ftp some files to their server and run the install script.
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.
While I'm not entirely convinced about expanding the scope of MW's dependencies just yet I am pretty convinced these days that "you need shell access to something resembling a real server" is not an untenable place to be in for our minimum requirements, especially as VPS prices continue to fall.
-Chad