On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 5:29 PM, Greg Grossmeier greg@wikimedia.org wrote:
Or a benefit, giving third-party users confidence that the core they use has a quick feedback loop with real users and is thoroughly tested.
It's all about perspective.
From these conversations, your perspective seems to be (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that what WMF does with deployed code should have no bearing on MediaWiki core/master. And that all of our massive testing infrastructure equally shouldn't touch core/master.
There is a difference between deploying code on a test cluster and deploying it to all production servers.
Our "massive testing infrastructure" includes the Beta Cluster, Jenkins, SauceLabs, and the group0 wikis (test.wikipedia, mw.org etc). And, let's be realistic, the Wikimedia community as a whole. Code is never really tested until real users interact with it.
Sure, but immediately deploying untested changes to all users is a reckless method of having real users test something.
I probably mischaracterized your perspective, but I kinda wanted to make a point that this is all done with quality in mind, not the other way around.
Do you have a recommendation on how we would 'decouple' this while also keeping the same short feedback loop and testing rigor that we do have (and intend to increase, both in rigor and in speed of feedback)?
I think some of the things mentioned here are good solution. The biggest problem here is that this patch was launched almost completely untested. It should have been caught long before it was put into production.
*-- * *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016 Major in Computer Science