I'm going to jump to my conclusion instead of sending all of the 6
paragraphs I just wrote:
<quote name="Federico Leva (Nemo)" date="2013-03-23"
time="12:18:01 +0100">
Finally: once problems in steps 0–4 are fixed, the
5th can really
have the premise "There is now a reasonably good
list of important changes" and in the process you've also learnt who
is affected and what needs doing (flip switch A, notify set of wikis
X about B, write blog post Y two weeks before C, set up central
notice or magic WMF-users mind-reading tool Z a month before D).
Can we actually start thinking about #5? I think that will inform what
happens with 0-4 in many ways. What's the goal I'm working for in 0-4
for #5 to be effective? That's what I hoped to accomplish with my
previous email :)
It might take some re-thinking of what is the purpose of RELEASE-NOTES
and what should be in there, as well (given all of the previous
discussions that you mentioned and linked to). It will take some
clarification of what the purpose of the wmfXX "deployment notes" (for
lack of a better name) are, probably.
My (personal) thoughts:
== RELEASE-NOTES file ==
Audience: Third-party users of MediaWiki (ie: not admins on enwp, for
instance).
Contents:
* Important new features (ie: not everything and the kitchen sink
that's new).
* Breaking changes (API and non-API sections)
* Language Support Changes (Additional languages, coverage and such)
* Deprecations - SELF-TODO: We don't have any guarantee, that I can see,
that we deprecate for X releases before we remove
* Number of bugs closed, broken down by severity if we wanted, with a
link to a bugzilla page listing them all (why have 100/200+ lines of
bug numbers and titles in the text file without clickable URLs? Or
why double the number of lines with clickable URLs? Bugzilla is
"great" (for certain values of great) at listing bug reports.)
== Release Announcement (for X.XX releases) ==
Audience: Third-parties, mostly. This would be blogged, mailed out to
the widest number of applicable lists, etc.
Contents:
* "Yay, we accomplished something big" type messaging.
* Probably just the short list of new features and breaking changes.
* A link to the "full release notes" (above), which is mirrored on a
mediawiki.org page instead of pointing people to a gerrit URL.
== -wmfXX branch notes ==
Audience: all Mediawiki developers, interested technical Wikimedia
project members. SELF-TODO: This should probably be mailed out to the
wikitech-ambassadors list along with wikitech-l.
Contents:
* List of important changes/bug fixes including new features, breaking
changes, language support, and deprecations (ie: list of things in
RELEASE-NOTES file, mostly)
* Also, raw list of merges (this list comes in handy when debugging
breakages, notably)
* Raw list of closed bugs? This one is tougher given we don't have the
-wmfXX branches as a 'version' in Bugzilla, and it would be annoying
to have to reset bug target versions for each -wmfXX release.
That outline was helpful for me, at least. Am I totally wrong anywhere?
What should be added/removed/edited?
Thanks!
Greg
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