> "Technical debt" spontaneously brings the following items to my little
mind. They should not be about rewriting but rather "maintenance":
Agreed. It has long been the case that infrastructure critical to the
operation of the various wikis has been left without a clear
maintainer, or has been maintained only in the volunteer time of a
single staffer already fulfilling a full-time role. Teams would be
dissolved or reassigned to completely different projects after
completion, without the ability and/or willingness to even review
patches. That assumes that the team doing the work wasn't made up of
contractors who departed the Foundation when the project was
"completed", taking their knowledge of it with them.
This was a major factor in causing the technical debt problem, and
must be addressed to have any chance of solving it.
AntiCompositeNumber
(he/him)
On Fri, Apr 14, 2023 at 12:15?PM Andre Klapper <aklapper@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 2023-04-13 at 20:06 -0700, bawolff wrote:
> > > "I think there are lots of promising opportunities to incentivise
> > > people to pay off technical debt and make our existing stack more
> > > sustainable. Right now there are no incentives for engineers in
> > > this regard."
> >
> > Interesting. Personally to me, it can sometimes feel like we never
> > stop talking about technical debt. While I think paying off technical
> > debt is important, at times I feel like we've swung in the opposite
> > direction where we are essentially rewriting things for the sake of
> > rewriting things.
>
> "Technical debt" spontaneously brings the following items to my little
> mind. They should not be about rewriting but rather "maintenance":
>
> * librsvg for SVG rendering is a five year old version:
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T193352 /
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T265549
> * Graph extension on old Vega version 2.6.3: see subtasks of
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T292341
> * Scribunto extension on old Lua version 5.1 (last 5.1.x release was
> in 2012): https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T178146
> * 3D extension on a five year old three.js library in
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T277930#7636129
> * Removing the OpenStackManager extension from wikitech.wm.org:
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T161553
> * Removing WVUI from MediaWiki
> core: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T310244
> * Replacing jsduck with JSDoc3 across all Wikimedia code bases:
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T138401
> * Undeploy VipsScaler from Wikimedia wikis:
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T290759
> * https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T151393 (a non-public task)
>
> This is not a complete list. Plus there are also separate "waiting for
> someone to make a decision" and "improving communicating & documenting
> already-made decisions" categories which would be different lists.
>
> Of course there might be valid reasons not to look into some of this
> technical debt (other higher priorities, high risk, complexity, etc).
>
> Cheers,
> andre
>
> --
> Andre Klapper (he/him) | Bugwrangler / Developer Advocate
> https://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/
> _______________________________________________
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mind. They should not be about rewriting but rather "maintenance":
Agreed. It has long been the case that infrastructure critical to the
operation of the various wikis has been left without a clear
maintainer, or has been maintained only in the volunteer time of a
single staffer already fulfilling a full-time role. Teams would be
dissolved or reassigned to completely different projects after
completion, without the ability and/or willingness to even review
patches. That assumes that the team doing the work wasn't made up of
contractors who departed the Foundation when the project was
"completed", taking their knowledge of it with them.
This was a major factor in causing the technical debt problem, and
must be addressed to have any chance of solving it.
AntiCompositeNumber
(he/him)
On Fri, Apr 14, 2023 at 12:15?PM Andre Klapper <aklapper@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 2023-04-13 at 20:06 -0700, bawolff wrote:
> > > "I think there are lots of promising opportunities to incentivise
> > > people to pay off technical debt and make our existing stack more
> > > sustainable. Right now there are no incentives for engineers in
> > > this regard."
> >
> > Interesting. Personally to me, it can sometimes feel like we never
> > stop talking about technical debt. While I think paying off technical
> > debt is important, at times I feel like we've swung in the opposite
> > direction where we are essentially rewriting things for the sake of
> > rewriting things.
>
> "Technical debt" spontaneously brings the following items to my little
> mind. They should not be about rewriting but rather "maintenance":
>
> * librsvg for SVG rendering is a five year old version:
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T193352 /
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T265549
> * Graph extension on old Vega version 2.6.3: see subtasks of
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T292341
> * Scribunto extension on old Lua version 5.1 (last 5.1.x release was
> in 2012): https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T178146
> * 3D extension on a five year old three.js library in
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T277930#7636129
> * Removing the OpenStackManager extension from wikitech.wm.org:
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T161553
> * Removing WVUI from MediaWiki
> core: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T310244
> * Replacing jsduck with JSDoc3 across all Wikimedia code bases:
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T138401
> * Undeploy VipsScaler from Wikimedia wikis:
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T290759
> * https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T151393 (a non-public task)
>
> This is not a complete list. Plus there are also separate "waiting for
> someone to make a decision" and "improving communicating & documenting
> already-made decisions" categories which would be different lists.
>
> Of course there might be valid reasons not to look into some of this
> technical debt (other higher priorities, high risk, complexity, etc).
>
> Cheers,
> andre
>
> --
> Andre Klapper (he/him) | Bugwrangler / Developer Advocate
> https://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/
> _______________________________________________
> Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/CPV223QA263TSB6MHOM4IGKMREWS4EKV/
> To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
_______________________________________________
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To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org