Hey, Hi Rexford, > > What objectives would we achieve if we were to "revamp the MediaWiki system > from ground up"? Even if we pretend that we have infinite financial and > human resources to do this, I am not sure what we would accomplsh, and we > would likely introduce a lot of new reliability and security bugs. >
I can't answer for Rexford, though can provide you with a reply of my own. You are quite right that the resources needed to rewrite a software as big and complex as MediaWiki from ground up in one go are not realistic. I think this is simply not feasible and a bad idea to begin with. There is plenty of good writing on the topic of migrating away from legacy systems, often cautioning against "the big rewrite". That does not mean that moving away from the current platform is a bad idea. Of course there needs to be good reason to do so. Is the current platform causing problems severe enough to warrant changing direction? Look at all the effort being put into the software surrounding Wikipedia and associated projects. A lot of enthusiastic and smart people are spending plenty of time on it. So how come progress has slowed down so much? How come we cannot easy add new functionality? What exactly is causing all this effort to be spend so inefficiently? And how much more would we be able to achieve if those issues where not there? One concern with rewriting or redesigning things that I've seen outlined often is that it is easy to just end up at the same place again. If no effort is put into identifying why the old system ended up in a bad state, then it's naive to expect the new one will not suffer the same fate. > and we would likely introduce a lot of new reliability and security bugs. Is that something inherent to writing new software or migrating away from legacy systems? Or is that simply what would happen if such a task was attempted without altering development practices first? Cheers -- Jeroen De Dauw - http://www.bn2vs.com Software craftsmanship advocate Evil software architect at Wikimedia Germany ~=[,,_,,]:3 _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
