In terms of what to do instead, at least on the search end of things, we have lots of high level things to work on, specifically:

* Integrating page view statistics into the scoring
* Calculating page rank of the wikipedia's and integrating that into scoring
* Extending the relevancy lab MVP to be more useful
* Integrating the above scoring adjustments into the replacement completion suggester

All of these have a good bit of work that can be done without pushing any brand new code to mediawiki prod in december. The php end of things is, comparatively, the easy part. Research still needs to be done on how to weight page view statistics, how to weight page rank, how to move this data from hadoop to the elasticsearch cluster, etc. etc. We can easily fill a month with this work and be able to test how it improves the search results in january.
 

On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 3:42 PM, Chad Horohoe <chorohoe@wikimedia.org> wrote:
What Max said.

I'm not a huge fan of code freezes generally speaking, I think they're a
false sense of security and encourage developers to stack a lot more
changes when the freeze is over...leading to more regressions than if
you'd not frozen to begin with.

What I greatly prefer is code slushing...no big features or refactors, stick
to small-ish bug fixing. That also answers Pine's question about what
to do instead.

-Chad


On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 3:33 PM, Max Semenik <maxsem.wiki@gmail.com> wrote:
How that is going to happen in practice? Deployment train will continue functioning in December, as Greg says, so a full code freeze would mean no merges into master - I don't think this is workable.

On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 3:26 PM, Tomasz Finc <tfinc@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Team and those that follow Discovery,

We're exploring a code freeze for December in order to not conflict
with any fundraising changes, respect everybody's holiday time, and
provide some significant heads down time.

The reading and editing departments are code freezing for the whole
month and we could do the same. We could also free for just the last
two weeks.

Emergency changes could go through as long as Katie and Greg are ok with them.

Eager to see what both the the team and public who work with us think

--tomasz

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--
Best regards,
Max Semenik ([[User:MaxSem]])

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