Hi Mark,
Comments inline
On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 7:01 PM, Mark A. Hershberger <mah(a)everybody.org> wrote:
On 08/31/2012 05:02 PM, Rob Lanphier wrote:
Sam would be the one to publish the tarball, but
anyone can generate
an unofficial alpha tarball, and I'd encourage that.
We can already use the code to create a tarball, we already have
nightlies (
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Nightlies), and we already
have the GPL license to distribute the code, so how do you see this working?
How would unofficial alpha tarballs carry any weight with anyone if
there isn't a direct path from alpha to release? It seems like that is
just encouraging forking, something that I'm trying to avoid.
It's not forking. It's helping with the pre-release practice. If
you're running the same scripts, and going through the same process
we'd eventually go through, then what we're doing is simply a rubber
stamp (and can probably just automate it at some point). This isn't
much different than the process that some Linux kernel devs follow
sometimes (e.g. Andrew Morton) prior to an official Linux release from
Linus.
Why not allow the community to make a tarball release
if the community
cannot give money to support the tarball?
Because "the community" isn't going to produce the tarball. Someone
in the community (you?) will be doing it, and I want whoever we hand
the keys to build some trust in with everyone else that they are going
to release a quality product before anointing them. Or rather, before
I can recommend we do it; it's not solely my decision.
The step of actually uploading the tarball to the right place on
mediawiki.org is the most mechanical (and thus least interesting) part
of the process anyway. Authorship of the release notes, testing on
various platforms with different databases, identifying and fixing the
blockers, and applying the last bits of polish are the parts that
generally take the longest. And, as near as I know, none of that is
done, so let's focus on those bits.
Rob