[Labs-l] Naming of the two Tool Labs projects

[Ryan Lane]

On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 6:45 AM, Tim Landscheidt <tim at tim-landscheidt.de>wrote:

> Silke Meyer <silke.meyer at wikimedia.de> wrote:
>
> > On the German version of the Roadmap somebody commented on the naming
> > of the two projects "Bots" and "Tools" and found them unclear: From
> > what I understood the main differences between the two are 1) how
> > stable or experimental the tools are and 2) how the maintenance is
> > organized (rather community-driven or done by WMF staff and
> > WMF-approved volunteer admins). It is true that the name "Bots"
> > doesn't exactly tell "this is for experimental stuff". It rather
> > sounds like "this is for bots only".
> > Can these projects be easily renamed? If so, we should think about
> > choosing more meaningful names for them (e.g. "Experimental" vs.
> > "Stable").
>
> > What do you think about this?
>
> I just want to point out that Tools is (well, will be) a
> perfect place to design, develop and deploy (almost) all
> tools.  Especially with the migration from Toolserver, the
> allusion that development has to happen on Bots and deploy-
> ment on Tools, can be very confusing and detrimental.
>
> If tool maintainers don't need root privileges (or don't
> know what those are :-)), they should consider Bots as just
> another of the 163 projects where great and interesting
> ideas are pursued.
>
>
Indeed. If folks don't need root to test/develop their tools/bots, then the
tools project is a perfectly acceptable place to do so.

In some cases they make want some libraries or infrastructure that doesn't
exist, and they may know linux well enough to try this stuff out on their
own. In that case a separate project that allows root access is a good idea.

If the names are confusing, we can create a new project called
tools-experimental and phase out the bots project. Renaming projects is
pretty difficult.

- Ryan
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