[Rebuild] Read Only?

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 03/26/2012 03:14 PM, Kate Chapman wrote:
> I've read through the threads and I'm unsure if a decision has been made
> on the read-only status of the database starting tomorrow.

It is slightly unclear who makes decisions here. The general mode of 
operation seems to be "some board members are fuming about their wishes 
not materializing" and "everyone tries to not get in the line of fire by 
at least being seen to frantically work towards the non-attainable goal" ;)

There is a technical solution that requires practically no downtime but 
would take - wild guess! - about two weeks, the so-called "soft" method 
in which a bot would be preparing the data for the changeover but 
everything would still work normally (albeit possibly slower since the 
API would have to cope with rebuild in addition to its normal load!), 
and then the changeover could happen in an instant when all is done.

This approach, which I have been advocating ever since someone came up 
with it, is less error prone and less stressful, but not very palatable 
to those who believe that "every day counts" in terms of the final 
license change announcement.

The competing approach means to make the API read-only or even disable 
it altogehter (personally I don't see the point in read-only; our API is 
for editing and that's not possible with read-only), so that the changes 
can be applied faster. The wild guess for how long this would take is "a 
few days".

Neither wild guess is supported by any evidence though. The advantage of 
the "soft" method is that if the wild guess turns out to be totally off 
then the only harm done is that the license change drags on for a few 
weeks more (after about 250 weeks in the making), whereas with the 
"hard" method if it turns out to take longer the whole project comes to 
a halt until the change is complete.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"