[Labs-l] [labs] bots project is turning to testing environment of tools project

[Petr Bena]

Hi

Most of you already know that, but I will repeat it once more, so that
everyone who is using bots project is aware of that.

Since tool labs (project tools on wikimedia labs) is now serving the
purpose which bots project on labs initially served for, we decided to
convert bots project to testing environment of tools project (and
shelter both wikimedia labs projects under the one big "virtual"
project called "tool labs")

I know it is very confusing naming but I hope once "aliasing" of
project names is possible on wikitech we just rename bots project to
tools-testing or something like that.

== I am already confused of the naming, explain now, or I will eat you ==

Wikimedia labs = a platform which host virtual instances, each
instance being a member of some labs project (that is basically entry
in LDAP which all these instances and members of project are member
of)

Tool labs = is a project that is supposed to offer hosting for web
based tools and bots. Tool labs consist of 2 wikimedia labs projects -
bots (testing) and tools (production)

== What does it mean for me in practice ==

The bots project will look very identical to tools project, but if we
need to test anything we will do that on bots just to make sure it
won't break tools project. That is a main difference.

Beside that bots project is going to be smaller (we don't need to
allocate so many resources just for a testing platform). Right now we
have 3 grid execution hosts, in future we will probably have 1 (or 2).

Therefore if you are hosting your bot on bots project now, you
/should/ move it to "stable" version of tool labs which is the tools
project. You don't need to do that if you don't want - but eventual
breakages may happen, and stability is not really guaranteed on bots
project (not that it was on tools :-))


TL/DR: If you are hosting your bot on bots project right now, move it
to tools project if you can, or bad things may (but not necessarily
will) happen to it, if we manage to break bots during some test.