On 03/12/2013 04:43 PM, Chris McMahon wrote:
On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 2:21 PM, Matthew Flaschen mflaschen@wikimedia.orgwrote:
In the case of the GettingStarted extension v2, we used a feature branch because it was a user-facing change that took a few weeks to get ready for deployment. Because it was user-facing, there were interactions, and we wanted to test it, we wanted to do it in one shot.
If there were a convenient mechanism to do it, this is a great example of something I would like to see enabled on beta labs during development but disabled in production until ready.
The problem is, gating can become a maintenance burden when you're making larger changes. You have a long strings of code in if/else blocks, sometimes necessary files.
In such cases, I think branching might be better. In our case, we tested on http://toro.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page . If it were considered alright to test branches on Beta labs, that would have been an option.
Matt Flaschen