The reading web team inherited the PageImages exception since one of our team members (no longer part of the team) was setup with its creation.
The team is predominately made of frontend engineers, so supporting a predominately backend extension is challenging. Particularly one for which we have not contributed much to.
That said it seems to be undergoing changes by the core platform team. We reached out to them but they didn't have capacity to take it on.
The PageImages extension is an essential bit of architecture providing images to search results on mobile and apps (and soon desktop). It also provides the images that show in shares to social networks.
It would be great if we could find better maintainers for this core project.
Rubric
Number, severity, and age of known and confirmed security issues
none (yet!)
Was it a cause of production outages or incidents? List them.
Not yet. However fatals have and are occurring in production
Does it have sufficient hardware resources for now and the near future (to take into account expected usage growth)?
I have no idea! Part of the problem. The team maintaining it has little knowledge of infrastructure.
Is it a frequent cause of monitoring alerts that need action, and are they addressed timely and appropriately?
When it was first deployed to Wikimedia production
circa 1.25+
Usage statistics based on audience(s) served
High. Every search result on mobile (web+apps) hits it.
Changes committed in last 1, 3, 6, and 12 months
Maintenance only patches
Reliance on outdated platforms (e.g. operating systems)
N/a
Number of developers who committed code in the last 1, 3, 6, and 12 months
Todo
Number and age of open patches
Only 3 at time of writing.
Number and age of open bugs
- Most of which are feature requests.
Number of known dependencies?
0
Is there a replacement/alternative for the feature? Is there a plan for a replacement?
No need to replace.
Submitter's recommendation (what do you propose be done?)
The maintenance cost of this extension is very low, but given its importance ideally this should be supported by an infrastructure team. The web team is not a great fit.