On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 6:29 AM, Max Semenik <maxsem.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 21.09.2010, 6:09 Rob wrote:
I'm not sure what you mean by this. October
15 would be the branch
point, not the release date. Are you saying that we have to release
to production one month before even branching off of trunk?
Yes, if we really care what we release.
Doesn't this kinda depend on what our priorities are and what the
priorities of people running MediaWiki are? There are many demands
placed by Wikipedia that most websites don't have. In the rest of the
software world, high traffic websites are the *last* ones to upgrade,
not the first. Don't we want to get the benefit of other people using
the software more heavily before we put it on Wikipedia?
I realize that this isn't how it's traditionally been done, but then
again, I think our tradition has drifted. Once upon a time, trunk was
very regularly deployed in production. Providing releases was merely
an alternative to telling MediaWiki admins "just go checkout trunk;
that's what we're using". Now that we're a lot more cautious about
what we put into production, we should question whether we still need
to be even more cautious about what we release as MediaWiki.
Currently, trunk is quite
broken due to Resource Loader and other things, which is absolutely
understandable: no one can write a major feature that works flawlessly
from commit one. Even in best scenario it will take at least a couple
of weeks to be ready for Wikipedia. Then, there are lots of other
things, and even more will be revealed during a thorough code review.
And you shouldn't even try to assume that RL will work smoothly once
rolled out to the WMF cluster - more fixes will be needed, as
experience with previous JS-heavy Usability Initiative features shows.
To summarize: we will have more or less sane code in 6-8 weeks from
the time when our next CR begins. Only then it will make sense to
branch for at least one month of final bug-squashing before releasing.
All schedules faster than this are unrealistic. If WMF wants to keep a
predictable release schedule, they should aim for full scaps at least
once per month.
Assuming that ResourceLoader is still in pretty rough shape a month
from now, then yeah, there's no point trying to foist that on
MediaWiki users, no more than it will make sense pushing it to
Wikimedia sites.
Rob