2010/11/3 Bryan Tong Minh bryan.tongminh@gmail.com:
Yes. There are a few people who in my opinion are very capable and in the future it is probably a good idea to give them shell access (Chad, Aryeh?)
But for now this is a bit moot point. We're not even close to ready with review, let alone deployment.
Not for core no, but there are plenty of extensions that could be reviewed and deployed in a shorter period of time, and many config changes ready to go.
An issue very much related to this whole extension deployment discussion is the somewhat broader issue of shell requests, which are often about the enabling of certain extensions. I'm gonna make a McBride-esque statement here and say that the sad truth is that the Foundation doesn't seem to care about shell requests at all.
Officially, Rob Halsell is responsible for handling shell requests, but from what I know he's been too busy to actually do that more frequently than once in a blue moon, a situation that hasn't changed materially over the past year or so* . JeLuF (Jens) somewhat regularly clears out some of the backlog, but he's a volunteer who's not paid by WMF and has a day job. Shell requests that Rob and Jens feel uncomfortable handling typically get left to rot.
I think it's fairly evident from the previous paragraph that shell requests are very low on WMF's priority list and are being neglected right now. If WMF wants to keep its wikis' communities happy (and I'm sure it does), it should dedicate more resources to handling site requests. Sure, we can and should widen the circle of people who can (both technically and socially) deploy things and change configuration settings, and I intend to help with that by documenting our scripts, procedures and pitfalls properly, but that isn't going to solve much if those people don't have time because their "real" responsibilities take up all their time.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)
* Back in December 2009, I had to take a few weeks off for fiscal reasons and spent that time processing some of the backlog, which I remember jokingly characterizing as "doing Rob's job because he doesn't have time for it"