On 21.09.2010, 6:09 Rob wrote:
I'm not sure what you mean by this. October 15 would be the branch point, not the release date. Are you saying that we have to release to production one month before even branching off of trunk?
Yes, if we really care what we release. Currently, trunk is quite broken due to Resource Loader and other things, which is absolutely understandable: no one can write a major feature that works flawlessly from commit one. Even in best scenario it will take at least a couple of weeks to be ready for Wikipedia. Then, there are lots of other things, and even more will be revealed during a thorough code review. And you shouldn't even try to assume that RL will work smoothly once rolled out to the WMF cluster - more fixes will be needed, as experience with previous JS-heavy Usability Initiative features shows.
To summarize: we will have more or less sane code in 6-8 weeks from the time when our next CR begins. Only then it will make sense to branch for at least one month of final bug-squashing before releasing. All schedules faster than this are unrealistic. If WMF wants to keep a predictable release schedule, they should aim for full scaps at least once per month.
Of course, everything said above is only my personal opinion and I'm not pretending to say The Absolute Truth(tm), but believe me, even I'm overpessimizing things, I'm not overpessimizing them too much.