On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 8:04 PM, Rob Lanphier robla@wikimedia.org wrote:
On the leadership front, let me throw out a hypothetical: should we have MediaWiki 2.0, where we start with an empty repository and build up? If so, who makes that decision? If not, what is our alternative vision? Who is going to define it? Is what we have good enough?
Let's throw out that hypothetical, because it's too grotesque even as a conversation starter.
The model I do think we should consider is Python 3. Python 3 did not jettison the Python 2 codebase. The intent behind the major version change was to open up a parallel development track in which it was permissible to break backward-compatibility in the name of making a substantial contribution to the coherence, elegance and utility of the language.
Python 3 development started with PEP-3000[1], which Guido published in 2006, some fifteen years after the initial public release of Python. MediaWiki has been around for almost as long, and it has been subjected to rather extraordinary stressors during that time.