On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 11:40 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.orgwrote:
Compared to the other things roots have to do, adding a few entries to langlist and running the update script is trivial, so I think developing tools to open this up to more users would be a misuse of time. The difficult things with wiki creation are:
- Finding the bug reports for wiki creations, or remembering to look
at a list at appropriate intervals.
- Working out which wiki creation requests are properly approved by
whatever process it is that we have at the moment.
- Interpreting the vague requests by the incubator users for special
configuration of the new wiki.
If there is a non-root user who is prepared to do these things, an IRC private message to a root user should be enough to get the DNS changes done in a matter of seconds.
Given that the pushing out of DNS updates is already scripted up, I worry about keeping the need to go grab someone and get them to add a line to a file and run the command.
No it isn't much work in literal terms, but there's a surprisingly big gulf between "thing you can do yourself in 2 minutes" and "thing you can mostly do yourself in 2 minutes, but you'll have to track down someone else to do 30 more seconds for you, make sure they understand what you're asking for, see if they agree, and hope they have the time and inclination to actually do it".
What I'd like to see is that the people who are actually approving new wiki creations should be able to actually make a wiki creation happen immediately. Most of the configuration settings *should* be things that can be set at creation time or afterwards, through a web interface, by those same people or stewards, bypassing the need to bottleneck decision->implementation through system administrators.
Forcing all this stuff to be done by a small number of server admins and developers hand-editing configuration files in a terminal isn't a good use of peoples' time. The actual config editing is awkward and error-prone, and the need to communicate, verify, and authenticate requests slows things down and keeps power out of peoples' own hands.
-- brion