[Toolserver-l] communication with wiki communities

[Andrew Dunbar]

2009/6/15 Daniel Kinzler <daniel at brightbyte.de>:
> River Tarnell schrieb:
>> Daniel Kinzler:
>>> I'm not quite sure though if the toolserver blog should be on the planet...
>>
>> it already is.
>
> Right. I was wondering if it should be.
>
>>> On the other hand, status reports like "replication failed, will fix
>>> tomorrow" is not so helpful in the aggregated feed.
>>
>> i don't know if that belongs on the blog; i intended it for organisational
>> issues more than technical.  we do have a mailing list already...
>
> Yes, which is what toolserver users read. But we have an increasing need to
> inform "ordinary" weiki users about what'S going on. Because they are using the
> tools as part of normal site operation. The blog would be an easy< way of doing
> that, I think.
>
>
>>> The Toolserver, or more accurately, the Toolserver cluster, is a project by
>>> Wikimedia Germany
>>
>> with assistance from Wikimedia France (ZWS).
>
> True. And we are trying to make it easier for other chapters to support us. It's
> a bit tricky tax-wise, i'm told.
>
>>> The Toolserver cluster, is located in Amsterdam
>>
>> and one machine in Tampa.
>
> Indeed. And as dutch people insist, the cluster is no longer in Amsterdam at
> all. It's in Haarlem, about 10km west of Amsterdam :)
>
>
>>> I believe that there was some frustration by people who had the skill to
>>> develop helpful tools for the wiki communities, but did not get access to the
>>> main server cluster, for security reasons. So the idea arose to create a
>>> place for such people to work with the data.
>>
>> it's interesting that the Toolserver turned out quite differently than we
>> initially expected; i had hoped to create a community where people would work
>> together to create useful tools, but instead we have isolated users who create
>> their own tools (or in some cases, 10 copies of the same tool) and rarely work
>> together.  it's a shame; i think the former would be much more useful than what
>> we have now...
>
> Increasing cooperation would be cool. One thing that might help is to promote a
> "toolbox", that is, a shared library of utilities to be used and maintained by
> everyone.

Yes I think we need to promote opening up tools somewhow. Most of my tools
are intended to be useful to others and improvable to others but I'm
often disappointed that nobody lends a hand. Partly I guess they don't
know about my tools and partly they don't know how to lend a hand.

> I suppose we should also rethink our permission model for svn repositories.
> Without a shared repository, cooperation is much harder.

In my case I don't even seem to have a working svn repository any
more. I used to work on one of my projects a year or two ago, took a
wiki break, then things were changed and I haven't been able to use
svn again since despite filing a report on Jira.

I really want my code to be seen by others so they can point out
ineficciences and such.

>>>> * If one gets an account, what are the responsibilities?  I know
>>>> accounts had to be reconfirmed, are there resource limits such as disk
>>>> space limits for each user? or what?
>>> It's the user's responsibility to comply to the rules, that is, to do no evil.
>>> There are no hard limits on resources, users are asked to be considerate.
>>
>> we do have a hard limit on memory use, which is 1GB per user.  (because
>> we often found users would consume all the available memory, whereupon the
>> server would crash.)

Do tools get signalled when they use too much memory? Or just killed?

Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)

> Ha, good to know. That's how sucky a system admin I am :)
>
> -- daniel
>
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