[Labs-l] [Labs-announce] [action required] We are removing inactive projects.

[Harry Burt]

On Sat, Jul 9, 2016 at 12:12 AM, Bryan Davis <bd808 at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> [snip]
>
> I think that historically the collective "we" have done a poor job of
> recognizing the cost and savings associated with use of the Labs
> environment.
>

[snip]
>
> When you spin up a new VM or launch a grid job in Tool Labs there is
> an opportunity cost to the Wikimedia movement that should be
> respected. Every compute hour or gigabyte of storage your personal
> project consumes is one that is not available for someone else.
> Shutting down unused systems and cleaning up projects that have run
> their course is a reasonable thing to ask.
>

Well put Bryan. I think all devs should agree that recognising resource
constraints and opportunity costs is wholly reasonable as a term of use.

If the exercise is to be repeated, however, I do think it makes more sense
to ask "Can I delete this?" (opt-in) rather than "Unless you tell me not
to, I'm going to delete this" (opt-out) -- after all, there may be
unmaintained but useful projects (whose users are not on this list). You
may ultimately have to revert to an opt-out system (from what I recall, the
experience on the Toolserver in getting users to volunteer their tools for
deletion was pretty mixed) but to me it feels wrong to not have given it a
go first. ('Purge' also sounds a little dramatic!)

Or maybe you did give opt-in a go and I just missed it, in which case feel
free to ignore my rambling...

Best
Harry (User:Jarry1250)
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