2011/3/23 Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org:
I think our focus at the moment should be on deployment of extensions and core features from the 1.17 branch to Wikimedia. We have heard on several occasions that it is the delay between code commit and deployment, and the difficulty in getting things deployed, which is disheartening for developers who come to us from the Wikimedia community. I'm not so concerned about the backlog of trunk reviews. We cleared it before, so we can clear it again.
This post has convinced me that planning a move to Git at this time would be premature. I still believe it would be better than SVN, but as Tim points out we have much more serious issues to address first.
I disagree, however, that the backlog of trunk reviews is not concerning. It means that we still haven't come up with a good process for reliable and quick (as in time between commit and review) code review. I have briefly told the list about my ideas for this in the past, maybe I should revive that thread some time. I also believe that, once we have a process where every commit is reviewed within a reasonable timespan (ideally at most a week), getting deployment closer to trunk and getting it to stay there will actually be fairly easy to do.
We used to have such a process once: a few years ago, Brion used to spend every Monday catching up on code review, reverting broken things, and deploying something resembling HEAD. At some point this broke down due to Brion's lack of scalability, and in the years that have passed our SVN activity has grown to a level where I don't believe code review is a one-person, one-day-a-week job any more. But that's not necessarily a problem: we can scale it by adding people and giving them the time and management they need. But that wasn't really ever done in a permanent fashion.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)
P.S.: The final paragraph is not meant to suggest that Brion was the one and only code reviewer back in those days. Other people also reviewed code, and I don't mean to marginalize their contributions, I just wanted to point out that Brion was the driving force behind regular review and deployment happening.