Communication in the wikiverse is hard.
To clarify, this is _not_ an issue with MobileFrontend. The same
problem effects users without JavaScript. There was a fundamental
problem with this patch that sadly didn't get caught during code
review. It broke the workflow of mobile on an important page in
production which is a bad thing. On a side note it saddens me that
mobile gets very little attention during code review on essential
parts of our infrastructure. If anyone has any ideas on how this can
be remedied please let me know.
Moan about the deployment train:
The code was merged at the final hour before a deployment train (this
is another issue that our deployment train doesn't distinguish between
patches that have been sitting on master for a week with patches that
have been sitting there for 1 hour). Had this been merged on a
Thursday morning we would have had more luxury and a revert maybe
could have been avoided (but I still don't think that patch was in a
mergeable format).
In answer to a few statements you made...
"Wikipedia has a notorious policy against edit warring, where users
are encouraged to discuss changes and achieve consensus..."
Agreed but that consensus should also be achieved during review. It
seems during the code review process [1] there was an open concerns
that had been raised and a -1 from Steven that was unaddressed. In
this case we have the luxury to discuss this more and explore problems
and in my opinion it was not worthy of a rushed merge. Yes we can't
please everyone but it would have been good to get more people
involved in this conversation.
"not everybody is subscribed to mobile-l, so you cannot expect the
original reviewers to see or know about it"
Yes, and posts to wikimedia-l go straight to my archive, so I usually
miss them so I wasn't aware of this mail until someone pointed me to
it. Communicating so everyone gets a message is hard :-).
That said I did screw up here though in that I didn't comment on the
patchset with a link to the mobile-l mailing list. In fact I started
to and then got distracted by a conversation and forgot to hit save. I
Will be more careful in future. All conversations about code should
start in code and I'm sorry I didn't adhere to this rule this time.
[1]
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/114400/
On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 2:08 PM, Tyler Romeo <tylerromeo(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 4:15 PM, Steven Walling
<steven.walling(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
If your patch causes a serious UX regression like
this, it's going to get
reverted. The core patch involved was being deployed to Wikimedia sites /
impacting MobileFrontEnd users today. If we had more time in the deployment
cycle to wait and the revert was a simple disagreement, then waiting would
be appropriate. It is obvious in this case no one tested the core change on
mobile. That's unacceptable.
You quoted my email, but didn't seem to read it. Changes to MediaWiki core
should not have to take into account extensions that incorrectly rely on
its interface, and a breakage in a deployed extension should result in an
undeployment and a fix to that extension, not a revert of the core patch.
*-- *
*Tyler Romeo*
Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016
Major in Computer Science
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Jon Robson
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