Since the beginning of the year, the Wikimedia Language team has enabled
translation backports for MediaWiki core, extensions and skins hosted on
Gerrit. On a weekly schedule compatible translations from master branch are
backpored to all the supported release branches. Currently supported
branches are 1.35–1.38.
Translation backports partially replace the purpose of the
LocalisationUpdate extension. Wikimedia sites no longer use the extension,
and to our knowledge only a few other users of the extension exist, because
it needs manual setup to use.
We, the Language team, think that maintaining the LocalisationUpdate
extension is no longer a good use of our time. We are asking for your
feedback about the future of this extension.
We are planning to:
* Remove LocalisationUpdate from the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle
starting from version 2022.07
* Remove us as maintainers of the extension
Additionally, based on the feedback, we are planning to either mark the
extension as unmaintained, transfer maintenance to a new maintainer, or
request the extension to be archived and removed from the list of
extensions bundled with MediaWiki core if there is no indication that
anyone uses this extension.
We request your feedback and welcome discussion on
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T300498. Please let us know if you are
using this extension and whether you would be interested in maintaining it.
*Anticipated questions*
Q: What about Wikimedia sites: does this mean they will not get frequent
translation updates as they used to have?
A: We still think this is important, but we do not think the previous
solution can be restored. We would like to collaborate on new solutions.
One solution could be more frequent deployments.
-Niklas