I don’t want to shut down the tool, but its three pages are written in three programming languages, one in PHP, one in Perl and one in Python (plus a static index.html), which is not supported in k8s… So migrating to k8s requires a complete rewrite of the tool, which is doable – and would result in much cleaner code –, but requires quite some work (especially as I’m only the maintainer of the tool, not the author).

My apologies if this ticket comes as a surprise to you. In order to ensure WMCS can provide a stable, secure and supported platform, it’s important we migrate away from GridEngine. I want to assure you that while it is WMCS’s intention to shutdown GridEngine as outlined in the blog post https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2022/03/14/toolforge-and-grid-engine/, a shutdown date for GridEngine has not yet been set. The goal of the migration is to migrate as many tools as possible onto kubernetes and ensure as smooth a transition as possible for everyone. Once the majority of tools have migrated, discussion on a shutdown date is more appropriate. See T314664: [infra] Decommission the Grid Engine infrastructure.

As noted in https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2022/03/16/toolforge-gridengine-debian-10-buster-migration/ some use cases are already supported by kubernetes and should be migrated. If your tool can migrate, please do plan a migration. Reach out if you need help or find you are blocked by missing features. Most of all, WMCS is here to support you.

However, it’s possible your tool needs a mixed runtime environment or some other features that aren't yet present in https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2022/03/18/toolforge-jobs-framework/. We’d love to hear of this or any other blocking issues so we can work with you once a migration path is ready. Thanks for your hard work as volunteers and help in this migration!

In T320210#9114857, @bd808 wrote:

It might be possible for maintainers to work on this now that https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Toolforge/Build_Service has support for installing apt packages.

Thanks for the tip, this may be the way to go once Build Service is stable.