On 1/4/11 9:24 AM, Michael Dale wrote:
So ... it would be good to think about moving things like img_auth.php and thumb.php over to an general purpose api media serving module no?
It's related, but we're just laying the foundations now. I think we haven't really talked about this on wikitech, this might be a good time to mention it...
We're just evaluating systems to store things at scale. Or rather Russ Nelson (__nelson on IRC) is primarily doing that -- he is a contractor whom some of you met at the DC meetup. The rest of us (me, Ariel Glenn, Mark Bergsma, and the new ops manager CT Woo) are helping now and then or trying to evolve the requirements as new info comes in.
Most of the info is here:
http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Media_server/Distributed_File_Storage_cho...
We've narrowed it down to two systems that are being tested right now, MogileFS and OpenStack. OpenStack has more built-in stuff to support authentication. MogileFS is used in many systems that have an authentication layer, but it seems you have to build more of it from scratch.
Authentication is really a nice-to-have for Commons or Wikipedia right now. I anticipate it being useful for a handful of cases, which are both more anticipated than actual right now: - images uploaded but not published (a la UploadWizard) - forum avatars (which can viewed by anyone, but can only be edited by the user they belong to)
I think thumbnail and transformation servers (they should also do stuff like rotating things on demand) are separate from how we store things, and will just be acting on behalf of the user anyway. So they don't introduce new requirements to image storage. Anybody see anything problematic about that?
As for things like SVG translation, I'm going to say that's out of scope and probably impractical. Our experience with the Upload Wizard Licensing Tutorial shows that it's pretty rare to be able to simply plug in new strings into an SVG and have an acceptable translation. It usually needs some layout adjustment, and for RTL languages it needs pretty radical changes.
That said, it's an interesting frontier and it would be awesome to have a tool which made it easier to create translated SVGs or indicate that translations were related to each other. One thing at a time though.