On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 11:27 PM, Trevor Parscal tparscal@wikimedia.org wrote:
95% is pretty extreme.
Can't agree on this, as the number covers:
- All curent shared host users - Those who use an entry-level VPS and would suddenly discover that with a few extra node services their RAM is insufficient - People who aren't technical enough to run a bunch of services glued together with PHP - Especially if these services are even a tiny bit more complex to install than `apt-get install` - People who run MW in strict corporate environments where installing just another piece of software is a big deal
I initially considered writing 99%, but decided that some users might consider upgrading their plans, etc. Still, 99% is proably the accurate estimate of current installations potentially affected by servicization.
I have always questioned the balance being struck here, and would welcome an adjustment of the minimum requirements to run MediaWiki. In many cases, if we can just require shell access we can automate away the complexity for the typical use cases.
Yep, maintaining the ability to run MW in crappy environments has always been a losing battle, and especially since we're planning to ditch PHP 5.3 support soon (which would render MW incompatible with a lot of crappy hosts) it might be the time to officially declare that we don't care about supporting environments without shell access. Still, shell access does not equate to root access or even to running Parsoid from userspace, that's a different story.