Ryan wrote:
Again, as I've mentioned, Labs purpose isn't a Toolserver replacement. It's vision is much, much larger than what the Toolserver can do.
Which in the meanwhile will allow us to do a much, much narrower set of things for Wikimedia projects than the Toolserver can do.
Of course, maybe in 5 or 10 years users will be able to reinvent from scratch or readapt what has been done on the Toolserver in these years, and in a much better way. Before that age en.wiki might have been locked due to editor activity drop.
But yes, you're right, we should be using a better terminology: the Toolserver isn't being "replaced", it's being killed/terminated/discontinued/trashed/<insert favourite word here>.
Hersfold wrote:
You may not have meant for it to lead to the end of the Toolserver, but apparently that's how WMDE is taking it, and it sounds like that's going to be the inevitable result. To say otherwise is rather naive at this point, given the size of the threads talking about this.
+1 (except that it's not WMDE).
Ryan wrote:
I'll be honest, I don't really care about the politics behind any of this, and I'm going to ignore anything more related to that. WMDE dropping Toolserver is their decision [...]
Ridiculous. Your boss said that it's the WMF's decision to terminate the Toolserver just a few mails ago: «for our part, we will not continue to support the current arrangement (DB replication, hosting in our data-center, etc.) indefinitely». http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/toolserver-l/2012-September/005294.html
[...] and it doesn't affect how Labs will operate in the future. [...] WMDE will be providing resources to help with migrations.
Can Pavel confirm this? Or are you the one who decides about WMDE budget now?
In general, I'm really amazed by this approach "it doesn't affect us" etc. Is Wikimedia Labs supposed to advance Wikimedia's mission and help Wikimedia projects or not? Can this be done ignoring the context? Do you really think that trashing all tools and services currently on Toolserver rather than ensuring they mostly will continue operating makes any sense for the scope of Wikimedia Labs? I wish someone guesstimated the value of Toolserver's current tools and services in terms of developing work hours and the cost for migration. I'm quite sure that by requiring a huge effort for migration and therefore trashing most stuff you'll be losing millions of dollars of value for your Wikimedia Labs. Too bad that also Wikimedia projects will lose the corresponding value.
Finally, I'm greatly re-evaluating the wisdom of those users who across the years insistently used things like appspot.com, heroku.com or their own websites where possible for their Wikimedia tools. They are extremely unreliable and limited by what's possible with dumps, API and screenscraping, but at least they don't rely on a single person in the WMF not pressing the huge red button.
Nemo