On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 9:36 AM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 21 September 2010 17:26, Rob Lanphier
<robla(a)robla.net> wrote:
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?
Speaking as someone who installs MW from tarball every now and then
... it feels like there's WMF development, for WMF purposes, and
there's also an occasional tarball of variable quality.
I've experienced that myself.
Arbitrarily declaring "release time!" from
trunk for untested code
means development is effectively forked between trunk-to-tarball and
the WMF version.
No one is suggesting that we be completely arbitrary.
(This may then lead to the tarball being volunteer
effort and the WMF
version being paid effort, per Simetrical's note on the subject. I
submit this might also turn out not to be a good idea.)
Regardless of who gets paid by whom for what, it seems like further
detangling the WMF production release process from the MediaWiki
release process might not be a bad idea.
I found really basic bugs in 1.16 betas (e.g. an
install bug that made
it literally impossible to install on a fresh server) that destroyed
my confidence in 1.16 and left me still installing 1.15.x by
preference.
I submit that making the tarball version even less tested than at
present is not going to get more testing achieved, but less.
I don't think it's a matter of "more" or "less", but rather a
question
of dependencies. How much testing did the installer get by being
deployed to production on Wikimedia sites? There is going to be code
that doesn't get tested at all (e.g. installer, sqlite support) solely
by virtue of being deployed in WMF production. So, what do we gain by
putting an arbitrarily long lead time of sitting in production prior
to releasing a MediaWiki tarball?
Rob