In case anyone's wondering what I think of this, I was pretty blunt last time around:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2011-April/052893.html
To be any more blunt than that, I'd have to press the caps lock key ;)
This post seems to be a much more optimistic view of the 1.17 deployment than I remember. Wasn't it rolled back twice? I also remember getting reports of random issues for weeks after the deployment as well. People were asking for us to do a rollback a couple weeks after the deployment even.
1.17 still doesn't have a tarball release. It is *very* late. It doesn't seem to me that this process is working.
I agree with the testing process, but I disagree with the deployment process. We can apply the testing process to a continuous integration deployment model. From an ops perspective, this is much nicer; if something is going wrong, we know fairly quickly what caused it to go wrong.
- Ryan