On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 7:27 AM, Mark A. Hershberger mah@nichework.comwrote:
On 10/01/2013 09:25 AM, Brion Vibber wrote:
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...
Fair enough.
If WMF were the only user of MW, you could freely decide to take MW it whatever direction you choose. But doing that now without considering the needs of other MW users isn't responsible.
We are considering other users here. Isn't that the point of this thread?
Not everyone needs to run Wikipedia and it is a worthwhile effort to make sure MediaWiki remains scalable down to the shared-hosting level.
I disagree. I think making it scale down to the VPS level is acceptable. Should you always be able to at least *install* the bare MediaWiki on some dinky shared host? Sure. But we don't have to make promises about scaling. It's never going to scale, ever.
Before a decision like this is made (and I would like people like David Gerard of RationalWiki to continue to weigh in, not just WMF employees), I would like to get some actual statistics on the number of shared hosting users. How are they running their sites? Do larger wikis have the time and the budget to support this sort of move?
If they're large they're not on shared hosting. It's impossible to run a large wiki on shared hosting.
Also: moving? Who said anything about moving? We're talking about possibly just not caring about shared hosts so much, not actively breaking them.
Perhaps WMF should just fork off their own "enterprise" branch of MW?
We do branch MediaWiki every release cycle. A full blown fork would be a bad idea.
-Chad