Here is a regular reminder that: - You can't throw money at a problem and expect it to be solved automatically. - $100M is a lot of money but 1- Not all of it goes to personnel, especially engineering personnel. 2- It's not that much money compared to the rest of technology companies and their personnel expenditure especially the ones with similar scale.
On Wed, Apr 20, 2022 at 11:14 PM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga < [email protected]> wrote: > We may differ in what was first: abandoning it or closing it, but the > process is available at phabricator. > > Here it wais said FOUR! years ago that the service would be closed and > done by PediaPress (what didn't happen): > https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T184772#4116906 > > Here, we have a more detailed post saying that the functionality would be > back: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T184772#4119731 > > The last details were provided 3 years ago, when it was said that the > PediaPress "solution" didn't happen: > https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Uxkv0ib36m3i8vol > > We migh also have a different view on priorities, but a Foundation with > 100 million dollars in a vault can pay for someone to solve this issue, no > doubts. The problem is again that we have a vehicle, but no maintenance and > no one driving it down the slope. > > By the way: the Proton PDF render is also failing if the article has a > gallery. But no one cares about it. It used to work, it was broken, and no > one was responsible for the fail. > > Sincerely > > Galder > > > 2022(e)ko api. 20(a) 17:02 erabiltzaileak hau idatzi du (Gergő Tisza < > [email protected]>): > > On Tue, Apr 19, 2022 at 11:04 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga < > [email protected]> wrote: > > The problem is not that it was "Just one of the things that died out > because no-one could be bothered to maintain it", it is worse: it was > broken on purpose, and not recovered, because the WMF decided that no one > cares about it. > > > That is patently untrue. The book renderer (OCG) was, due to the lack > of maintenance, increasingly causing problems for the operators of > Wikimedia production services, and the approach it was based on (converting > wikitext to LaTeX) resulted in an endless stream of discrepancies in the > PDF output. It was replaced with another PDF rendering service that used a > headless browser - an approach that resulted in much more faithful > rendering (basically it outsourced the cost of maintaining a good PDF > generator to browser vendors) but didn't scale well and wouldn't have been > able to handle large collections of articles. > > I'm not fond of that decision but it obviously wasn't about disabling > something that worked before, just for fun. The Foundation had to choose > between risking platform stability, a significant time investment to > modernize the service (at the detriment of other projects that time could > be invested into), and shutting down a feature that saw relatively little > use, and chose the third. > > FWIW there was a volunteer-maintained service doing LaTeX-based > multi-article book generation which might still be functional: > https://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/ > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list -- [email protected], 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/[email protected]/message/OWNWQB7JYYNJZ2NAGWLPDJ4BKTNXZMGY/ > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] -- Amir (he/him)
_______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- [email protected], 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/[email protected]/message/UKEXFMEN34OOZYNVLFGPZZ6RYGWGMBSL/ To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
