I would gladly participate to this effort.

I'm looking for a non-WMF "hacking buddy" to work on this during Wikimania 2015 (in Mexico City). Anyone interested?

I had doubts about this (mentioned on the other bug) but after talking to bd808 on irc im less worried. [Just mentioning here because i left a comment on other bug]

It is time to promote Wikimedia-Hackathon-2015 activities in the program (training sessions and meetings) and main wiki page (hacking projects and other ongoing activities). Follow the instructions, please. If you have questions, about this message, ask here.

Did someone work on this project during Wikimedia-Hackathon-2015? If so, please update the task with the results. If not, please remove the label.

@cscott MediaWiki now supports deferring the thumbnail/image scaling effort to a separate service (as of rMWa9213ccb4c77: Add ability to proxy thumbnail requests to a service). Although even before this, one could set up rewrites to bypass MediaWiki entirely for thumbnail urls.

For Wikimedia production, this has been done, by using Thumbor (see blog post), and while we're continuing to maintain the MediaWiki implementation for smaller installs and for custom API methods, it's unlikely Wikimedia would dedicate resources to a dedicated PHP-based service for this (in the short term, anyway).

I'm just checking if you're still interested in having this task open? I imagine as part of the long-term Librarization effort, it might get done regardless, but we don't need this task for that.

Is the task about turning the thumbnailer into a library, or turning it into a service (as in MediaWikiServices), or turning it into a standalone service like Parsoid etc? I doubt the first is feasible (it needs to read the the database, extensions hook into it etc). T66214: Define an official thumb API Would turn it into a REST API (so sort of a service from an external POV although still running on top of MediaWiki).

@cscott: Could you reply to the last two comments, please?

In T91104#3995044, @Krinkle wrote:

I'm just checking if you're still interested in having this task open? I imagine as part of the long-term Librarization effort, it might get done regardless, but we don't need this task for that.

@cscott: Could you please reply to the previous comment? Thanks!