On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 4:19 PM, Mark A. Hershberger mah@everybody.orgwrote:
On 02/21/2013 04:13 AM, Siebrand Mazeland (WMF) wrote:
B. Who is MediaWiki's release manager, and what can we expect of the
person
who has that role?
I had a conversation with Maria Miteva (Robla at least got copies of these emails) last week when she asked if I was planning on doing the release of MW 1.21 and whether https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.21 could point to me as the release manager for MediaWiki.
I told her I was still planning on doing that release, probably shortly before going to Amsterdam.
Yay! Thanks for that plan.
I think a lot of the confusion here (including my own) comes from the decisions that have been made outside of the Foundation surrounding the future of MediaWiki itself.
Yes, I agree.
As these decisions have been made (LTS, MW's Release Schedule, etc.), it appears that the Foundation has become more focused on its goals -- Wikipedia and its sister sites -- and less concerned with the logistics of MediaWiki outside of the Foundations use.
As Siebrand pointed out, this seems to extend to the description of the duties of the newly hired release manager.
Absent an explicit statement from anyone inside Foundation, we've been a bit confused.
So, I'll WP:Bold and answer Siebrand's question: I am MediaWiki's release manager.
That makes me very happy, and creates at least some clarity. Thank you, Mark.
Here is what you can expect of me:
Manage the release schedule. At least initially, I will be making the releases.
Work to get bugfixes backported to 1.19. I don't have Gerrit rights to commit to the REL1_19 branch, but that will keep me from fixing "bugs" by fiat.
We also have REL1_20, of course. I have just nominated you to be added as a MediaWiki core maintainer. Feedback is requested at http://hexm.de/MarkForCore.
- Champion features that non-WMF users want. This includes things like searching inside a category and a WYSIWYG editor.
As a non-native speaker I sometimes have to look things up in a dictionary. In this case I found out that "to champion" means "to fight for or defend a cause." Very noble of you. Please do ask for help, because those fights can be very lonely otherwise :).
- Work with community members to triage non-security bugs in released versions of MediaWiki.
Will it help if you get access to the Security area of bugzilla, or at least are informed of upcoming security fixes by Wikimedia employees on Mediawiki master?
Up to now, Chris Steipp has done backports and made security releases when security issues were fixed on master and in Wikimedia deployments, but it is unclear to me if this support will continue. It's probably a good idea demand clarity on this, Mark.
Is there something else the MW release manager should be doing? Let me know.
We probably now expect the world of you, but there's nothing explicit I can think of at the moment.
Is there anyone in the WMF who disagrees with this assessment? Now is the time to speak up.
The above are my own opinions, and not necessarily those of any of my clients.
Cheers!