And if someone was wondering why subscribing to changes is better than
watching them real time:

* No need to implement irc client in your bot, just a simple redis
queue downloading
* Your bot doesn't need to run to wait for a change at all (which save
resources greatly) it can just start once there are items in a queue
* You don't need to bother with invention of some parser for current
IRC messages, you can just pick a format easy to deserialize (like
json)
* If your bot crashes, you will not miss any edits (on other hand if
dispatcher daemon crashes you would :P but I hope we make it as stable
as possible)
* No need to create any edit filtering etc, this can be already part
of your subscription
* Easy way to distribute work in parallel across multi-instance bots.
Once a single bot fetches item, it disappear from redis queue
* And many other reasons I just can't think of right now


On Sun, Jul 28, 2013 at 6:35 PM, Petr Bena <[email protected]> wrote:
> I think you kind of misunderstood my proposal hashar :) I know that,
> IRC feed is where the dispatcher is going to take data from, the
> difference is, that dispatcher is a special service for bot operators,
> that allow them to subscribe for selected pages / authors (even using
> regular expressions) and it would filter these for them from RC feed
> (currently the IRC version) and fill them up in a redis queue they
> specify in a format they prefer.
>
> This was bots need to run much less often, and bot operators need to
> do much less work watching the activities on wiki's. I don't know if
> people will like this or not, but it is surely going to be useful at
> least for 1 bot operator in future, and that would be me :-)
>
> And I really believe that once I create a proper documentation for
> this so that people understand how it works, many others will find it
> useful. It is just a subscription service that let you do /something/
> (where something in this moment is element of { "redis queue" } but in
> future might be more than that.
>
> It should be a flexible subscription system which works completely
> other way than current RC feed does. RC feed provides you with all
> changes in real time. This thing will provide you with filtered
> changes, even back in time (you will pick them up from redis queue).
>
> The most simple thing to use as an example would be a bot that should
> do something with every edit to pages Wikipedia:SomeProject/* (like
> review / archive whatever). The bot operator would just issue command
> similar to this:
> https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bot_Dispatcher#Example_usage in
> order to create a redis queue of edits matching
> Wikipedia:SomeProject/.* regex
>
> I am very bad in explaining of stuff, but I believe once people
> understand what I am about to create, they would eventually find it
> useful :-)
>
> On Sun, Jul 28, 2013 at 2:16 PM, Antoine Musso <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Le 27/07/13 12:34, Petr Bena a écrit :
>>> It would watch the recentchages of ALL wikis we have @wm and users
>>> could subscribe (using web browser or some terminal interface) to this
>>> service, so that on certain events (page X was modified), this bot
>>> dispatcher would do something (submit their bot on grid / sent some
>>> signal / tcp packet somewhere / insert data to redis etc etc).
>>
>> We already such a system!  The recent changes entries are formatted as
>> IRC colorized messages which are sent over UDP and relayed on
>> irc.wikimedia.org (look at #en.wikipedia).
>>
>> The related parameters are $wgRC2UDPAddress and $wgRC2UDPPrefix.
>>
>> So a bot writer can hop on that channel and consume the feed provided there.
>>
>> It has a few issues though:
>>
>> 1) the system is not resilient (machine die, no more events)
>> 2) messages are not machine friendly
>> 3) there is no schema description to ensure MediaWiki send the format
>> expected by bots
>>
>>
>> Ori Livneh has developed EventLogging which sounds to me like a good
>> replacement for the IRC stream described above.  You basically have to
>> write a JSON schema, then send a query with the key/value you want to
>> have in the system, it would validate them and send them in a zero mq
>> system.  From there, sub system can subscribe to a stream of messages
>> and do whatever they want with them (ie write to a database, send irc
>> notification or pubsub or whatever).
>>
>>
>> The main advantages of EventLogging are:
>>
>> a) it is already written
>> b) it is production grade (monitored, got incident doc etc)
>> c) it works
>> d) WMF staff supports it
>> e) has doc https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:EventLogging/Guide
>>
>> :-)
>>
>>
>> --
>> Antoine "hashar" Musso
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikitech-l mailing list
>> [email protected]
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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