2011/3/23 Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:
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.