On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 7:25 AM, Domas Mituzas <midom.li...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Feb 11, 2009, at 7:05 AM, Robert Rohde wrote: > >> It appears that the precision setting for PHP may be set >> inconsistently across the WMF server pool. > > hi, are you still doing your school homework assignments with > wikitext? get a calculator, already!
Yes Domas, haha, because no one would ever want to write about math or high precision scientific measurements in an encyclopedia. PHP has its limits. We know that. But the fundamental issue is that there are real applications whose output is changing depending on which server happens to do the parsing. For example, 80% of the time one might see the correct 13 digits expression for the number of atoms in a kilogram (formated via template according to NIST standards for scientific notation) and 20% of the time the page gets a big red error message. If the parser always failed, people would know they have to avoid the formatting templates and format the number by hand. However, when something fails only intermittently depending on which server happened to get the job that is a problem that is a lot harder for average users to diagnose. I would generally think the server admins would want all of the servers to generate identical behavior, if at all practical. Am I wrong in thinking that the server admins should care when different machines produce different output from the same code? In this case, the behavior suggests it may be as simple as ensuring that the servers have the same php.ini precision settings. -Robert Rohde _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
