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Re: Wikipedia software was Re: [kDev] RFC: Kendra Tools Project Plan 1...
Hi Neil and All,
Thanks for your email. Please see comments and questions:
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 12:22:45 +0000
From: Neil Harris
I'd start off by looking at the Phase III Wikipedia software.
I've taken a look at the site. It does have some good stuff there.
Do you advocate merging with their information gathering effort or just
using their software or participating in the development of the
software (separate branch or keep within their branch of the project)?
Should Kendra Foundation pay someone to develop Wikipedia to become
kendraTools?
It meets several of the requirements already, namely:
* International: already supports a large number of languages,
extensible to any Unicode-supported language.
* Logging: full history for all pages, support for admin tools
Can this only support pages/articles? I mean can it support data like
lists of kendraPartipants, their addresses, their servers, their songs,
their songs' business rules, their servers, which songs on which
servers, etc? And can we easily extend the data model to allow for new
objects bolted on?
For example we want record labels to share their song metadata for a
global catalogue. Now, traditionally, before we allow them to input
anything we need them to tell us what their data structure is. But,
hold on, does that mean we need to talk to every record label to build
a global data structure? Can't do it that way not practical. So, we
need to enable any new record label coming in the the project to
describe their own data structure and how it relates to what's
currently their. Yes? How do we do that?
* Syndication: RSS feeds already running.
* Comment feedback: yes
* Per-user namespaces: yes
Other advantages:
* highly customizable
All cool.
* existing developer and 1000+ user base
* current database exceeds 100,000 articles with full histories
Above 2 points only relevant if we merge, yes?
* written in PHP
* bag database on Sourceforge
* support for image download and TeX for formulas
* tested under high loads (300,000 hits/day +)
* supports interactive content updates (2000+ edits/day)
* currently runs on a single 2-cpu server running Linux
All cool.
* uses clean client-server design, so scalable to multiple page-servers
sharing a database
We need totally distributed databases. Each
company/organisation/group/individual may want to host their own data
and we need to be able to cope with that.
* provision for page caching
* GPL licence
If we just use what they give us then fine but if we want to develop
the code under our own branch then we'll have to use the GPL. The GPL
is great for what it wants to do. However, Kendra's aim is about
getting kendraSystem created and I can only see the best way of doing
that is to release as public domain or as close as we can legally get
to that. So, EVERYONE can then use the code in ANYTHING they produce
and if they can make money from it then so much the better. Yes?
Drawbacks:
* currently runs on MySQL, although a port to PostgreSQL has been
discussed
What's wrong with MySQL?
* performance is currently limited by write-locking, although a
shift to Postgres should fix this
What's wrong with write-locking? Does it freeze the whole database
momentarily?
Look forward to it...
Cheers Daniel