On 2010-09-21, Rob Lanphier wrote:
On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 6:29 AM, Max Semenik maxsem.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On 21.09.2010, 6:09 Rob wrote:
I'm not sure what you mean by this. October 15 would be the branch point, not the release date. Are you saying that we have to release to production one month before even branching off of trunk?
Yes, if we really care what we release.
Doesn't this kinda depend on what our priorities are and what the priorities of people running MediaWiki are? There are many demands placed by Wikipedia that most websites don't have. In the rest of the software world, high traffic websites are the *last* ones to upgrade, not the first. Don't we want to get the benefit of other people using the software more heavily before we put it on Wikipedia?
I realize that this isn't how it's traditionally been done, but then again, I think our tradition has drifted. Once upon a time, trunk was very regularly deployed in production. Providing releases was merely an alternative to telling MediaWiki admins "just go checkout trunk; that's what we're using". Now that we're a lot more cautious about what we put into production, we should question whether we still need to be even more cautious about what we release as MediaWiki.
It was my impression that production release had slowed down due to a lack of resources, not due to additional caution. Has this changed then?
End users have an expectation that the software released by us is of the high standard we have always provided, and this is in part due to it being run on one of the worlds largest websites. End users are not and should not be guinea pigs for Wikipedia.
The last release took a year, so I see no reason why we shouldn't delay this one until we are in a position to release reviwed and reasonably tested code.
Robert