"Neil Kandalgaonkar" <neilk(a)wikimedia.org> wrote in message
news:4DE56CF9.9090608@wikimedia.org...
On 5/31/11 3:20 PM, MZMcBride wrote:
taking a page out of the rest of the business
world's book, you set a
deadline and then it just fucking gets met. No excuses, no questions.
I think you have an optimistic view of how businesses actually work. :)
The only modification needed to bring that sentence in line with business
reality is adding "it just fucking gets met **or someone's head rolls**.
But, in any case, in a business, there is a Plan that
everyone is trying
to follow and in theory, deviations from that Plan are avoided. In our
environment we want to be responsive to the schedule of a volunteer
developer, who may be completely unaware or uninterested in our plans.
Plenty of businesses work on a rolling-development model, probably more
businesses than have totally static specs. The difference between that and
WMF, and even between WMF and other non-businesses like Linux and Mozilla,
is that if a release is mandated by some higher power and something is
holding up that release, **whatever it is gets steamrollered out of the
way**. If there is a clear roadmap that says that any feature that's not
debugged and ready-to-go by Wednesday morning, by the first Tuesday of the
month, by the 32nd of June, whenever, then it gets reverted, no one is going
to complain when lo and behold, such features get reverted. *Everyone* is
going to complain if the 32nd of June becomes the 32nd of December before
the feature even makes it onto the cluster.
Perhaps the answer is that we have to give the
volunteer developers some
obvious pathway to harmonizing their and our priorities. Like, if you're
working on files and multimedia, you should be emailing Bryan, me, or
maybe Tim or Russell. Could it be that simple?
The
problem seems to be finding anyone to lay down the damn law.
Well, it's not like wiki pages happen by someone cracking a whip either.
That said, we would benefit from some urgency towards correcting the
problem.
Wiki pages don't need a whip, and nor does MediaWiki. Wiki pages are
*missing* several layers of delays and checkpoints in the
volunteer-writes-something-to-volunteer-sees-it-in-use chain. MediaWiki is
currently like a wiki with FlaggedRevisions turned on on every articlespace
page, but with all the admins on the wiki working on other things such that
no one gets round to cleaning out the Special:OldReviewedPages list more
than once every *nine months*. That would kill a wiki community stone dead
*pretty much instantly*.
"Brion Vibber" <brion(a)pobox.com> wrote
in message
news:BANLkTinZzef=oRVuw9dWiCVAHYBUWXniqg@mail.gmail.com...
Sing it, brother! We're getting *some* stuff through quicker within the
deployment branches, but not nearly as much as we ought to.
The fact that some things are *not* getting stuck in the CR quagmire is part
of the *problem*, not the solution. The upper levels of the developer
hierarchy ***obviously know*** that the mainline CR process is substantially
broken, BECAUSE ***THEY'RE NOT USING IT*** FOR THINGS THAT ARE IMPORTANT TO
THEM. The unavoidable implication of that observation is that the work of
the volunteer developers *DOESN'T* matter to them. Whether or not that
implication is correct (I have confidence that it's not) is irrelevant, the
fact that it's there is what's doing horrible damage to the MediaWiki
community.
--HM