[Labs-l] open grid on bots

Tue Mar 12 15:01:25 UTC 2013

On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 3:03 PM, Marc A. Pelletier <marc at uberbox.org> wrote:
> On 03/12/2013 04:33 AM, Petr Bena wrote:
>>
>> probably because people in wmf don't believe that anything
>> operated by volunteers can ever work
>
>
> Woah, woah, woah!
>
> Where did you get that?  I'm pretty sure absolutely nobody said that at any
> time; and that it would sound /really/ silly from the foundation that stands
> behind - you know - just the biggest volunteer-operated project on the web,
> ever?  (If not of human history).
>
> What *I* believe in (and I expect WMF Engineering shares) is that the labs
> need at least one sysadmin whose full-time job and /responsibility/ is
> dedicated to making a rock-solid environment for the development and
> deployment of external tools in support of our projects.  It's not about
> being "the WMF", but about being able to dedicate expertise, resources and
> /time/ towards that objective (which being contracted for allows).
>

That is something I agree with, I have no problems with having
sysadmins from wmf working together with volunteers. What I disagree
with is your disbelief that there should be some volunteer sysadmins
at all (or, right as you said: maybe eventually some day).

BTW that part regarding "foundation and wikipedia" is something I
wanted to remind you as well - if everything what requires some kind
of responsibility and knowledge would have to be done by paid
employees only, wikipedia would have never existed. So I still fail to
see why it all needs to be so extra restricted and not so open, as for
example wikipedia is.

> I think you are mistakenly conflating /ad-hoc/ system administration - which
> is often apropriate in experimental and exploratory development - with
> /volunteer/ system administration.  Yes, I am working on a design which will
> require a more deliberate approach to the architecture and deployment and
> where tool maintainers will not generally be allowed to do system
> administration.  That has nothing to do with my being *staff*, and
> everything to do with the set of design requirements I am working towards.
> If I was able to do this as a volunteer, I would /still/ do it the same way,
> because that is what is needed to reach the objectives.

I never said that tool maintainers should be all sysadmins. That's not
even how bots project run. The difference is, that if someone is
trusted well enough, have some skill and want to help out with
maintenance and setup of bots project as sysadmins - they can. That
makes a very big difference between tool labs and bots project.

> -- Marc
>
>
>
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