Thanks all for the interesting discussion. I think the most immediate actionable here is expanding group 1 wikis, so I'm looking into that here https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T286664. Ideally, it's my belief that 2 top ten wikis that are not English would give us the visibility of problems with UI changes that we need.
Some thoughts that come to mind: * What if group 0 and 1 were merged? How would that impact the train? From the data for the last 153 trains it seems those usually capture the majority of our issues. It wouldn't help capturing issues in group 2, but it would give more of a buffer to fix them. * What if group 0 happened after the security window on a Monday? Would that be too stressful/not feasible for those involved?
For me, regarding backporting on Fridays, ideally, as an engineer I appreciate a buffer going into the weekend to reduce any anxiety around my work having incapacitated our editors in some way. Deploying code on Friday's only increases that anxiety in some cases.
On Tue, Jun 22, 2021 at 3:09 PM Jon Robson jrobson@wikimedia.org wrote:
Thanks for all the input so far.
On Tue, Jun 22, 2021 at 2:41 PM Amir Sarabadani ladsgroup@gmail.com wrote:
Jon, I think you're misunderstanding the point of the "No Deployment on Friday" policy.
I don't think I'm misunderstanding the policy? I'm talking explicitly about high priority issues UI regressions, not unbreak now (ie. site is still functional but styled incorrectly e.g. imagine a link is the wrong color). I've used Friday deployments historically, but only for really really bad issues.
To give an example, if an icon is visually overlapping text I don't consider that an UBN, I consider that unfortunate. If the icon overlap is on the edit icon and that's not clickable, definitely UBN and I'm happy to go the extra lengths to get a Friday patch out.
I understand the Friday is a buffer, but it's not a great buffer, particularly now at the Wikimedia foundation most people observe "Silent Fridays", and many people in teams that are involved in decision making work in different timezones. Side note what constitutes a UBN UI regression is being discussed on the talk page [1].
Regarding Catalan and Hebrew Wikipedia, the other Amir said it well, I
don't think I have much to add beside the fact that I have personally seen them finding major issues before they hit all Wikipedia languages many times, more than I can count.
Apologies if I didn't make myself clear, but it seems I didn't given both Amir's comments. I am very happy that we have these, and my question was *not *why do we have them, but rather* why do we only have 2*. I want more of them and every time I've asked why we don't have more, I've been told it's a community decision and that seems odd to me.
[1] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Deployments/Holding_the_train