On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 10:21 AM, Ryan Schmidt skizzerz@gmail.com wrote:
This sounds like a problem we need to fix, rather than making it worse. I'd most wikis are not up to date then we should work on making it easier to keep up to date, not making it harder. Any SOA approach is sadly DOA for any shared host; even if the user has shell access or other means of launching processes (so excluding almost every free host in existence here), there is no guarantee that a particular environment such as node.js or Python is installed or at the correct version (and similarly no guarantee for a host to install them for you). Such a move, while possibly ideal for the WMF, would indeed make running on shared hosting nearly if not entirely impossible. The net effect is that people will keep their existing MW installs at their current version or even install old versions of the software so they can look like Wikipedia or whatnot, rife with unpatched security vulnerabilities. I cannot fathom that the WMF would be ok with leaving third-party users in such a situation.
You'd be wrong. WMF has been ok with it since they dropped efforts for supporting third parties (and knew that most MW installs were insecure well before that). It would be great if the problem was solved, but people have been asking for it for over 10 years now and it hasn't happened. I don't expect it to happen any time soon. There's only a couple substantial MW users and neither of them care about third party usage.
Moving advanced things into services may make sense, but it should not come at the expense of making the core worthless for third parties; sensible refactors could still be done on core while leaving it as pure PHP. Services, if implemented, should be entirely optional (as an example, Parsoid is not required to have a base working wiki. I would like to stick to that model for any future service as well).
I agree with other people that MW as-is should be forked. Until this happens it'll never get proper third party support.
- Ryan