On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 7:47 PM, Rob Lanphier robla@robla.net wrote:
I don't think there's been many public references to this, but that is more or less the timeframe many of us have discussed. There is at least one public reference here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Meetings/Release/2010-07-14
Several of us have a desire to get back on a more regular release cadence with MediaWiki releases generally, and MediaWiki 1.17 seemed like a good place to start.
The goal, as I recall, was branching October 15 or thereabouts, with first beta in November, and a release sometime after that (perhaps as late as January, depending on how well we do with the first beta). We really haven't had an organized discussion of the topic since that one meeting above, but maybe this email thread can be that conversation. Nothing about the schedule is carved in stone, so now is as good a time as any to bring up any objections to that timeline.
I think the primary objection would be that we don't want to do a release of code that hasn't run on Wikimedia for a while. We never have before, certainly. Not many people use wikis running RCs or betas compared to the number who use Wikipedia, so we'll get vastly fewer bug reports and thus ship a much buggier release if we don't scap the code well before we release it. It's also kind of sketchy to say that trunk is good enough for release when it hasn't been vetted as suitable for Wikimedia deployment.
So whatever the timetable is, we need to have "scap" placed somewhere significantly before "branch for release". If we say a month before, then that would be five days ago according to your timetable, so I don't think that's a good idea.