Thanks all for the interesting discussion.
I think the most immediate actionable here is expanding group 1 wikis, so
I'm looking into that here
.
Ideally, it's my belief that 2 top ten wikis that are not English would
give us the visibility of problems with UI changes that we need.
Some thoughts that come to mind:
* What if group 0 and 1 were merged? How would that impact the train? From
the data for the last 153 trains it seems those usually capture the
majority of our issues. It wouldn't help capturing issues in group 2, but
it would give more of a buffer to fix them.
* What if group 0 happened after the security window on a Monday? Would
that be too stressful/not feasible for those involved?
For me, regarding backporting on Fridays, ideally, as an engineer I
appreciate a buffer going into the weekend to reduce any anxiety around my
work having incapacitated our editors in some way. Deploying code on
Friday's only increases that anxiety in some cases.
On Tue, Jun 22, 2021 at 3:09 PM Jon Robson <jrobson(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Thanks for all the input so far.
On Tue, Jun 22, 2021 at 2:41 PM Amir Sarabadani <ladsgroup(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Jon, I think you're misunderstanding the
point of the "No Deployment on
Friday" policy.
I don't think I'm misunderstanding the policy? I'm talking explicitly
about high priority issues UI regressions, not unbreak now (ie. site is
still functional but styled incorrectly e.g. imagine a link is the wrong
color). I've used Friday deployments historically, but only for really
really bad issues.
To give an example, if an icon is visually overlapping text I don't
consider that an UBN, I consider that unfortunate. If the icon overlap is
on the edit icon and that's not clickable, definitely UBN and I'm happy to
go the extra lengths to get a Friday patch out.
I understand the Friday is a buffer, but it's not a great buffer,
particularly now at the Wikimedia foundation most people observe "Silent
Fridays", and many people in teams that are involved in decision making
work in different timezones. Side note what constitutes a UBN UI regression
is being discussed on the talk page [1].
Regarding Catalan and Hebrew Wikipedia, the other
Amir said it well, I
don't think I have much to add beside the fact that I have
personally seen
them finding major issues before they hit all Wikipedia languages many
times, more than I can count.
Apologies if I didn't make myself clear, but it seems I didn't given both
Amir's comments. I am very happy that we have these, and my question was *not
*why do we have them, but rather* why do we only have 2*. I want more of
them and every time I've asked why we don't have more, I've been told
it's
a community decision and that seems odd to me.
[1]
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Deployments/Holding_the_train