On Fri, 2013-02-22 at 11:24 -0500, Mark A. Hershberger wrote:
I can make and push tarballs without involving Chris.
But yes, we need to discuss policy, and start setting expectations, etc.
<tl;dr>: There's now a "Backport_to_Stable" dropdown in Bugzilla for backporting requests. Set it to "?" if you strongly feel that a fix should be backported.
Long version:
As a first step, I've set up a dropdown menu (a "flag" in Bugzilla terminology) called "Backport_to_Stable" for the Bugzilla products "MediaWiki" and "MediaWiki extensions" which can be seen in bug reports below the "Web browser" and "Mobile Platform" dropdown menus.
A backport request to a stable branch for an existing bugfix can be demanded by anybody who has "editbugs" permissions in Bugzilla (that's most of the users) by setting that flag to "?". Somebody can then either refuse the request by setting the flag to "-", or backport the bugfix and afterwards set the flag to "+". This is entirely independent from the status of the bug report.
As searching for flags is not trivial I have also shared saved queries for all three flag states. If interested, you can get these queries displayed in your Bugzilla sidebar under "Saved Searches" by going to https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=saved-searches , searching for the three "Backport_Stable" queries, enabling the "Show in Footer" checkbox, and clicking the "Submit Changes" button at the bottom.
Obviously there are still several open policy questions to sort out, but we've got to start somewhere.
andre