On 12 August 2011 12:44, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 6:55 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
And I ask all this knowing that we don't have the paid tech resources to look into it - tech is a huge chunk of the WMF budget and we're still flat-out just keeping the lights on. But I do think it needs serious consideration fo r long-term preservation of all this work.
This is part of WMF's purpose, actually, so I'll disagree on that point. That's why for instance we insist on using so much open source -- we *want* everything we do to be able to be reused or rebuilt independently of us.
I'm speaking of making it happen, not whether it's an acknowledged need, which I know it is :-) It's an obvious Right Thing. But we have X dollars to do everything with, so more to this means less to somewhere else. And this is a variety of technical debt, and tends to get put in an eternal to-do list with the rest of the technical debt.
So it would need someone actively pushing it. I'm not even absolutely sure myself it's a priority item that someone should take up as a cause. I do think the communities need reminding of it from time to time, however.
- d.