On 26 January 2012 21:53, Sumana Harihareswara sumanah@wikimedia.orgwrote:
On 01/26/2012 04:45 PM, Chad wrote:
On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 4:31 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
What's this about "taking your site down for maintenance"? I don't think Wikimedia wikis have needed to go into read-only mode or go offline(!)
for
an upgrade since like MediaWiki 1.5 or something. I skimmed https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.19 and didn't see any
crazy
database schema changes or anything. Am I missing something?
Not that I can see, there's no major schema changes this go round so I can't see any reason we'd need to go offline/readonly.
-Chad
OK. I was under the impression that we announce these windows partly because if something goes very wrong during the upgrade, sites might go offline or readonly. Is that wrong or inapplicable here? Perhaps better wording would instead just talk about possible JS breakage or some other, more likely ill effects? Let me know and I'll send a followup mail.
The risk of a new software bug sending a wiki offline is about the same
during a version update as for any other individual update: more changes are being pushed, but more testing has been done on them. Breakages can almost always be remedied by rolling back the deployment, especially now we have the het-deploy framework in good working order, and the more serious the breakage, the faster it will be noticed. Updates leaving the sites readable but readonly are pretty implausible, and a breakage leaving a site offline for a substantial period of time pretty unlikely. I'd say scheduling around 250 sets of national events against such remote eventualities is substantial overkill.
--HM