On 11/30/07, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The way large changes are usually handled is
small-scale testing (on
non-content wikis like private wikis or maybe
test.wikipedia.org)
followed by rolling out on all sites, and if necessary reverting that
and doing more small-scale testing. I imagine it's not considered
acceptable to have code with possibly major bugs running on even small
sites, and if you think it's not buggy, best to test that by as wide a
I think with the new parser, it won't be a question of buggy/not
buggy, but rather, how many of the language features are supported,
and how many pages are affected by the unsupported features, edge
cases etc. It will be relatively(!) easy to write a parser that
handles 90% of pages correctly, but then will take a careful process
of rolling out to expose all the cases that aren't handled correctly.
Anyway, it sounds like technically speaking, it's possible to do this
sort of roll out, so we can worry about how desirable it is, or what
the best way to do it is, if and when there is something to actually
roll out :)
(Thanks for the explanations, btw.)
Steve