On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 1:30 PM, Roan Kattouw roan.kattouw@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 10:25 PM, Rob Lanphier robla@wikimedia.org wrote:
This would be 1.19 at the earliest. 1.18 is already branched, and if we're aspiring to do much more frequent releases, the last thing we should do is to complicate a 1.18 release by trying to add more features into the branch. While this may not be a relatively small change, there are *lots* of features that are "small changes".
This argument completely misses the point. The (probably trivial) extra work is in the tarballing process and doesn't touch anything else. There's no way it can subtly break things.
You're willing to say there are exactly *zero* fixes that would be needed to be done in trunk and merged into 1.18 as a result of making this change?
I'm not going to dig my heels in on this one. However, I'd really like to encourage everyone to avoid piling non-critical into a release branch after it gets branched, and have the patience to wait for the following release. That's the only way we're ever going to speed up the release train.
I'm assuming our tarball release process currently involves doing "svn export" on the phase3 directory of the release branch. After that, I have no idea what sort of post-processing (if any) we do (er, Tim does). Clearly, having some extensions in there is something that makes things a little more complicated. Probably not rocket science, but it is work. I would prefer that we have a plan and a developer lined up to do this work before saying this is something that we're going to do. Who is willing to take this on? I would very much prefer if this were a volunteer rather than a WMF staff member.
Why don't we first ask Tim how complicated it would be, and get someone else to do it if it's more than 2-3 hours of work? I'm also not sure the scripts Tim uses to create a tarball are even in SVN anywhere, maybe he'd be willing to share them if they're not public already.
Even if it's 2-3 hours of work, I still would prefer that a volunteer gets involved in this area. Tim in particular has an overabundance of 2-3 hour tasks.
Rob