On 15-01-16 02:48 AM, Max Semenik wrote:
Can't agree on this, as the number covers [...]
An extra datapoint here: I think I can reasonably consider myself an
atypical user at the tail end of the sysadmin curve, and yet the
principal reason why I had delayed installing VisualEditor on a
mediawiki I administer is Parsoid.
Not because it's unusually complicated to deploy and install - it's
about as trivial as possible under Ubuntu at least given that there is a
package - but because it changes a number of fundamental assumptions
about what a mediawiki install /is/ and what maintaining it involves.
Service-based has implications on reliability and security and - no
matter how well we manage those implications - they add moving parts and
complexities. They increase the monitoring burden, and increase the
specialization and knowledge necessary to understand and debug issues.
I'm not saying any of those things are /bad/ or insurmountable, but that
they modify the landscape in a pretty drastic ways and that this /will/
impact the vast majority of users.
And I can honestly say that if the intent is to maintain a parallel
working implementation in pure php then - with my reuser hat - I don't
believe a word of it. :-) I happen to have been a long-time postgres
user, and yet when 1.23 rolled around and I wanted to start playing
around with VE I found that my only realistic alternative was to migrate
to mysql: postgres support had always been sporadic and not-quite-there
already, and the increased number of issues with the increased
complexity meant that it moved squarely in not-maintained-enough territory.
So yeah; there *is* a very significant impact.
-- Marc