In deference to the concerns raised by James Forrester, Markus and I have decided not to back out the REL1_24 branch.
Less than 80 hours have passed since the branch was made, so there hasn't been time to make any major technical changes in the code base. That leaves the social concerns that James raises. We respect him and his work as product manager for editing and don't want to make him suffer as the result of this snafu.
That said, I need to clarify some things about the schedule for releases.
For about a year now, we've used the schedule: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WikiReleaseTeam/Release_timeline
Markus did filled in the dates as a result of this situation, but we had already agreed on a release date, and, as a result, a branch point.
(Markus and I are not the only people who have edited the page, so it wasn't unknown. Still, we could have done a much better job of publicizing it. Thankfully, this incident has led to it being publicized.)
In this vein, we'd like to announce the date of the 1.25 release now and its respective branch point.
1.25 is scheduled for release on Wednesday, May 27th, 2015. Using the formula on that page (6 weeks prior to the release date), the branch date for REL1_25 will be April 15th, 2015 and this will be announced (again) on April 8th so that everyone will have a week's notice to merge anything that is necessary for 1.25.
Thanks, and I hope this clarifies any misunderstanding.
Mark.