2010/12/5 Robert Leverington robert@rhl.me.uk:
On the other hand this creates a huge amount of work in identifying and backporting any essential bug fixes between the branch point and HEAD at branching - I imagine probably more than it alleviates (albeit for different people).
Yes, there's a balance there. In the post you're replying to I said it should be considered if unreviewed revisions were skewed towards the recent ones, but this doesn't seem to be the case for /trunk/phase3 at least. See https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/mediawiki/wiki/User:Catrope/CR_stats#... for details (left column is a 3-digit revid prefix identifying a range of 100 revisions, right column is the number of new/fixme revs in that range): for instance, the past 7 days account for 5% of the review backlog, the past ~4 weeks for ~10%. However, we've only got good stats on phase3 at this time; I'll run them on phase3 plus WMF-deployed extensions tomorrow so we'll have the full picture.
The crux of the above: recent revisions are a tiny fraction of the review backlog (the last ~4 weeks of commits account for only ~10% of the backlog), at least for /trunk/phase3. IMO this means there's no reason to branch off anything other than HEAD. The picture might look different for WMF-enabled extensions, I'll have stats on them tomorrow.
Either way this is something that needs to be considered prior to branching as it will change the schedule and allocation of resources (to me the current schedule seems overly optimistic in this respect).
I agree the review backlog won't magically fix itself over the holidays, which is why I call on everyone who can help to do so or ask their boss to be 'allowed' to spend time on it (I hear RobLa is allocating some people's time to this).
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)