On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 10:21 AM, Ryan Schmidt <skizzerz(a)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