[Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation's support of OTRS

[Nicole Ebber]

Martin has answered my email and just left a comment on
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22622. I'll get him in
touch with Sumana via E-Mail.

Hope this helps, best regards,
Nicole

On 21 February 2013 21:37, Platonides <Platonides at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 21/02/13 07:19, [[w:en:User:Madman]] wrote:
>> Does anyone know what the status is of the OTRS project on Labs? Given
>> a contact, I'd be happy to do what I can to help; I have some limited
>> experience configuring/deploying OTRS (up until the end of the 3.0
>> branch last year, nothing with 3.1 or 3.2 unfortunately).
>>
>> I think opportunities for *volunteer* help have to consciously be
>> maximized, especially for volunteers who are or are willing to be
>> agents and/or identified to the Foundation. It's not going to get done
>> otherwise.
>>
>> -Madman/ea
>
> I don't see much future in that, sadly. Yes, a puppetization from a
> volunteer could help the WMF, however they won't give you access to the
> current setup that you would be replicating. And that's a point that has
> been barring any volunteer help for years on this topic. Only ops can
> work on it, but nobody is assigned to otrs, and they have other tasks.
> There's a mixture of technical needs, legal issues and
> too-risky-to-touch it.
> Then Martin Edenhofer appeared offering to help with it, but there was
> delay after dealy: a NDA is needed, then separate machines, later he
> needs to provide the ssh key...
> And no work is done.
>
>
> On 21/02/13 07:32, James Alexander wrote:
>> Yeah, I have to agree sadly that we need more tech support and this has
>> been a thing that has been ongoing for a while. I personally think it
>> should remain in the foundation for many reasons (the least of which is
>> relatively large legal reasons) but we REALLY need to focus on it, or a
>> replacement, more.
>>
>> OTRS is the public face of not only the projects but the foundation in
>> general and answers an absolutely insane amount of  email every year and
>> that has been the case for a while. When I first started applying to work
>> at the foundation my big interview ended up being about 8 hours (with a
>> liquor break in the middle) explaining to Philippe how I thought OTRS
>> needed to be replaced. I thought, and continue to think, that the system
>> underserves the job and we would be better served with something else that
>> could take much better advantage of modern advancements and clarity in
>> purpose.
>>
>> Sadly at the time they didn't have the money for me to work on OTRS (and so
>> I came to do the fundraiser) and since then I have heard rumors of it's
>> upgrade or replacement every single year (multiple times) only to be told
>> later that the resources aren't available. I've seen us look at the upgrade
>> multiple times, I've heard it be called both new "ceiling wax and cake
>> frosting" but not necessarily called a good option. It may be, I don't know
>> and we (as usual with outside products) overwork it beyond measure. Even
>> the professional OTRS folks when we were talking to them about helping
>> upgrade basically said "errr, you have HOW much in the database?" and told
>> us to just abandon it and start fresh with their new version. That said
>> even their internal OTRS version wasn't upgraded yet last year ....
>>
>> We need to do something though, it is disappointing to me that it hasn't
>> been a bigger priority because I think it should have been and I think it
>> should be now. I'm not sure if an OTRS upgrade is the best option... but it
>> is probably better then what we have. For a long while I thought we should
>> wait and not upgrade so that we can just replace it... but clearly it's
>> been too long for that now.
>>
>> James
>
> Thanks for your insight, James. It's very interesting.
> As you have dealt with it, can you clarify why is the upgrade such a big
> problem? Yes, we have tons of emails. So what? Does the upgrade use
> O(2^N) operations??
> Even if not-too-efficient, I would expect the upgrade to have finished
> in three years :)
> I don't even know about a test upgrade being performed ever.
>
> I agree that OTRS is kind-of inefficient. We could easily build a
> replacement in 1-2 months *keeping the old data*. If OTRS works quite
> well on a single server, just imagine what we could do in a multiple
> server setup. I find hard that such version would perform worse. Not to
> mention the “handy” improvements we could add based on our usage.
> But just a newer OTRS version would be an improvement.
>
>
>
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--
Nicole Ebber
International Affairs

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