Hey all,
This is a quick note to highlight that the REL1_36 branch has now been created for MediaWiki core and each of the extensions and skins in Wikimedia git[0]. This is the first step in the release process for MediaWiki 1.36, which should be out in late May 2021, approximately nine months after MediaWiki 1.35.
The branches reflect (or are at least very close to) the code as of the last 'alpha' branch for the release, 1.36.0-wmf.38, which was deployed to Wikimedia wikis last week for MediaWiki itself and those extensions and skins available there.
>From now on patches that land in the main development branch of MediaWiki and its bundled extensions and skins will be slated for the MediaWiki 1.37 release unless specifically backported[1].
If you are working on a critical bug fix that will affect the code in the release, once the patch has been merged into the development branch, you should propose it for backporting by cherry-picking to the REL1_36 branch.
If you are working on a new feature, that should now not be backported. If you have an urgent case where the work should block release for everyone else, please file a task against the `mw 1.36-release` project on Phabricator.[2]
If you have tickets that are tagged for `mw-1.36-release`, please finish them, untag them, or reach out to get them resolved in the next few days.
We hope to issue the first release candidate, 1.36.0-rc.0, in two weeks' time, and if all goes well, to release MediaWiki 1.36.0 a few weeks after that.
Thanks!