[Labs-l] What are "projects" and how should I use them (+intro)

[Ryan Lane]

On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 5:24 PM, Aaron Halfaker <aaron.halfaker at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't mean to be obtuse, but how does the bot project more easily share
> their infrastructure and community due to the presence of the project?  You
> see, I'm trying to learn how these things work.  I did not meaning to
> suggest that a bot developer should avoid the bots project.  I just want to
> understand how projects work and when I should consider creating a new one.
>

The project has sysadmin and netadmin members. They create instances
(which are virtual machines), and they turn those into a working
infrastructure. Only members of the project are able to access these
instances. The sysadmins define how people in the project have varying
levels of access in the instances, using sudo policies.

The bots project has an apache instance, that uses mod_userdir to
share bot output, it has mysql instances to give bots a place to store
SQL data, it has a directory structure set up under project data that
standardized in some way, it has bot instances, where the bots run,
etc.

If more instances need to be added, or if the infrastructure needs to
be improved, it's done as a community.

If you are in a brand new project, you are the sysadmin and netadmin,
and you start with nothing. It's good if you wanted to build a new
infrastructure, but it's not as nice if you just wanted to run a bot,
for instance.

We often give projects to mediawiki developers because they may build
an extension, then need to add their supporting infrastructure to it
as well. For instance, visual-editor needs parsoid. Wikidata needs a
whole bunch of things. They make an instance for mediawiki, and add
other instances for supporting infrastructure.

- Ryan