On 26 August 2015 at 10:35, Jaime Crespo jcrespo@wikimedia.org wrote:
Due to internal (and growing) complexity of the mediawiki software, and WMF installation (regarding numerous plugins and services/servers), this is a non trivial task. It also involves many moving pieces and many people- network admins (dns), general operations (load control/downtime), dbas (import/export), services, deployment engineers and developers (mediawiki configuration changes, patches).
What's worse, is that it would almost certainly create downtime for the wikis involved (not being able to edit) -specially given that it is not a common operation-, and some of them are smaller communities, and I would be worried be to annoy or discourage editing on those wikis (when we want the opposite!).
I'm not sure why database changes would be involved in a domain-only change? It should be simple enough to get the new domain set up in DNS and apache config, tell multiversion how to map it to the old DB name (there's an array in setSiteInfoForWiki that does this bit), and once it's all working swap wgServer and related variables over to the new domain.