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_ch…
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.
--
Neil Kandalgaonkar <neilk(a)wikimedia.org>