Hi Mark,
Comments inline
On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 7:01 PM, Mark A. Hershberger mah@everybody.org wrote:
On 08/31/2012 05:02 PM, Rob Lanphier wrote:
Sam would be the one to publish the tarball, but anyone can generate an unofficial alpha tarball, and I'd encourage that.
We can already use the code to create a tarball, we already have nightlies (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Nightlies), and we already have the GPL license to distribute the code, so how do you see this working?
How would unofficial alpha tarballs carry any weight with anyone if there isn't a direct path from alpha to release? It seems like that is just encouraging forking, something that I'm trying to avoid.
It's not forking. It's helping with the pre-release practice. If you're running the same scripts, and going through the same process we'd eventually go through, then what we're doing is simply a rubber stamp (and can probably just automate it at some point). This isn't much different than the process that some Linux kernel devs follow sometimes (e.g. Andrew Morton) prior to an official Linux release from Linus.
Why not allow the community to make a tarball release if the community cannot give money to support the tarball?
Because "the community" isn't going to produce the tarball. Someone in the community (you?) will be doing it, and I want whoever we hand the keys to build some trust in with everyone else that they are going to release a quality product before anointing them. Or rather, before I can recommend we do it; it's not solely my decision.
The step of actually uploading the tarball to the right place on mediawiki.org is the most mechanical (and thus least interesting) part of the process anyway. Authorship of the release notes, testing on various platforms with different databases, identifying and fixing the blockers, and applying the last bits of polish are the parts that generally take the longest. And, as near as I know, none of that is done, so let's focus on those bits.
Rob