[Toolserver-l] Windows toolserver

[Sebastian Moleski]

On Feb 7, 2008 3:28 PM, Daniel Schwen <lists at schwen.de> wrote:

> If it just boils down to "I feel cozy using C# on windows and never had a
> look
> at mono", then I'm sorry, that doesn't cut it for me.
> I had to acquire a considerable amount of expertise and put in a
> substantial
> amount of time to do the stuff I'm doing on the toolserver. Shelling out
> even
> one dollar just because someone is to lazy (sorry) to learn new things
> seems
> unacceptable to me.
>

It's kind of lovely how you feel that you have the right to judge how other
people should spend their time. This is especially interesting in the light
of the fact that you have no idea what range of commitments and engagements
other people have that also occupy their time and how that compares to the
task of learning how to program in a Linux environment.

Other than that, it seems to me that the pressing points again are: what
would people use a Windows environment for that was beneficial for Wikimedia
projects, for that's what the tool server is for. If there are users who are
most comfortable with a Windows environment and who have something valuable
to contribute, it seems somewhat shortsighted to tell them off because
they're "too lazy" to learn how to work with Linux.

Now, while I don't take personal offense, I am actually one of the people
who works exclusively in a Windows environment. While I do not know if River
has thought about raising the "Windows question" before, but I think him
asking here was also prompted when I asked him that question on IRC a few
days ago. I've written several bots that are in use on German Wikipedia
(plus a few other projects) performing archiving and recategorizing tasks.
The archiving bot is the most popular one used on German Wikipedia, the
recat bot is tightly integrated in our CfD process. These bots currently run
on an external Windows 2003 server I rent, paid out of my own pocket. To
make these bots work, I've written a general purpose "bot framework"
(similar to pywiki perhaps although I've never once looked at its code) that
can do a lot of things. It's written in C# and, because it's based on .NET,
can be used without problems by any other .NET compatible language. Do I
think there's value in what I created? Certainly. It's closed source at the
moment though but I've been toying with the idea of opening the source for a
while now.

If there was a toolserver with a Windows environment available, these bots
could be run on that server and managed just the same way as they are on my
own. Porting them to Linux would require quite a bit of work mostly because
all the logging is done with a local SQL Server 2005 database which is
accessed by an ASP.NET website on the same server (
http://sebmol.de/bots/log.aspx if you are curious). This porting work would
not really add any value to the actual bot, it would also mean that I
couldn't be involved in it anymore since I do not have time to learn how to
use and program in a Linux environment.

I hope this makes somewhat clear what we're talking about. Comments are
greatly appreciated, provided they don't burn down to something like
"Microsoft is evil, Linux FTW".

Best regards,

Sebastian
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