On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 6:31 PM, Neil Kandalgaonkar neilk@wikimedia.org wrote:
For what it's worth, I'm influenced by my former job at Flickr, where the practice was to deploy several times *per day*, directly from trunk. That may be more extreme than we want but be aware there are people who are doing it successfully -- it just takes a few extra development practices.
Personally, I think it would be awesome if we could migrate to this level of deployment frequency eventually. I imagine that comprehensive automated test suites are a major part of making this reliable. To the extent you can share any details about how stuff works at Flickr, what long-term changes are necessary for this to be practical?
On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 6:35 PM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
However I completely agree with Aryeh on the importance of wmf running almost trunk. The process itself could be automated, eg. a cron job automatically branching from trunk each Tuesday morning, and having the deploy programmed for Thursday. NB: I'm assuming a model where everyone can commit to the branch in the meantime.
We shouldn't branch at all for routine deployments of trunk. Just make sure everything looks good, maybe revert or temporarily disable anything that hasn't seen enough testing, then deploy current trunk. That way we don't have to worry about backporting.