On 2010-12-04, Roan Kattouw wrote:
2010/12/4 Robert Leverington robert@rhl.me.uk:
The schedule suggests an intial deployment in January, but my understanding is that even if there were no further commits it would still take until March for it to catch up with HEAD.
March has been mentioned by a few people now, and now you're even suggesting that /even with no further commits/ it would take that long. To me that seems overly pessimistic. The code review backlog in /trunk/phase3 was 775 revisions last time I checked (Saturday around 01:15 UTC). It shouldn't take 3 months to catch up with that.
The pessimism was not intentional, just noting my understanding of what others said. What you say sounds reasonable.
Of course "less than 3 months" doesn't necessarily mean it'll be a manageable amount of time, and there's WMF-deployed extensions to consider too. So I do think we should look at where the unreviewed revs are concentrated; if it turns out they're mostly recent, that'd be a strong case for moving the branch point into the past.
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).
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).
Robert