Hi everyone,
Just repeating something I just posted to
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/02/planned-1-17-deployment/
The engineering team is busy working on the deployment of the 1.17 branch of
MediaWiki[1]. We plan to roll this out next week to all languages and
projects, Tuesday, February 8, with work starting at 07:00 UTC (which is
11pm on Monday, February 7 for San Francisco).
If all goes well, you should only notice the improvement. If it doesn’t go
well, that’s because there’s something we missed, and that’s where we’d love
your help. Please help us test this release! We have a test instance of the
software we plan to deploy available at
http://prototype.wikimedia.org/. If
you find issues, please report them in Bugzilla:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bugzilla
There are many, many little fixes and improvements that have gone into 1.17
(see the draft release notes[2] for an exhaustive list) . There isn’t much
that’s visible to users of the site, but one under the hood improvement that
should result in some speed improvements: Resource Loader[3]. Resource
Loader optimizes the use of JavaScript in MediaWiki, speeding up delivery of
JavaScript by compressing it sometimes, and cutting down on the amount of
unused JavaScript that gets delivered to the browser in the first place.
Much of the work in this development cycle has been centered on ensuring
compatibility with the new system. Since it makes such a large shift in the
way that JavaScript is delivered to the browser, it’s also an operational
aspect we’ll be keeping a close eye on, as load shifts between servers in
our infrastructure.
Note that this isn’t a release for download, yet. On and after February 8,
the “latest” version of MediaWiki will still be 1.16 as listed on
mediawiki.org. We plan to update this to 1.17 sometime after the deployment
of the 1.17 branch, after we’ve had time to run it in production for a while
and fix the issues we’re likely to find.
So please, help us test this release, and if you find bugs, please report
them in Bugzilla. Thanks!
Rob
[1]
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_roadmap/1.17
[2]
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/branches/REL1_17/phase3/RELEASE-N…
[3]
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ResourceLoader
[4]
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download