On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 7:56 AM, Rob Lanphier robla@wikimedia.org wrote:
- Is the release cadence is more important (i.e. reverting features
if they pose a schedule risk) or is shipping a set of features is important (i.e. slipping the date if one of the predetermined feature isn't ready)? For example, as pointed out in another thread + IRC, there was a suggestion for creating a branch point prior to the introduction of the Resource Loader.[1] Is our priority going to be about ensuring a fixed list of features is ready to go, or should we be ruthless about cutting features to make a date, even if there isn't much left on the feature list for that date?
I'm afraid that branching before RL merge is not going to help in the present state of affairs. We have a zillion of unreviewed and untested revisions before that, so maintaining two branches will require us to virtually double the efforts.
- Projects with generally predictable schedules also have a process
for deciding early in the cycle what is going to be in the release. For example, in Ubuntu's most recently completed release schedule [2], they alloted a little over 23 weeks for development (a little over 5 months). The release team slated a "Feature Definition Freeze" on June 17 (week 7), with what I understand was a pretty high bar for getting new features listed after that, and a feature freeze on August 12 (week 15). Many features originally slated in the feature definition were cut. Right now, we have nothing approaching that level of formality. Should we?
Obviously, we're not ready to determine the exact date of 1.17 release, because we worked on it (and are continuing doing so) without a set date in mind. The question is what we should do to make things more predictable for 1.18. When we see how well that goes on, we could decide how strict we want our schedule to be - IMHO, Ubuntu's way results in buggy releases, as people reported some blatantly stupid regressions in 10.10.
- How deep is the belief that Wikimedia production deployment must
precede a MediaWiki tarball release? Put another way, how tightly are they coupled?
I believe that every developer believes so.
Thoughts on these? Any other tradeoffs we need to consider? We're
going to have a number of conversations over the coming days on this
topic, so I wanted to add a little structure and get some (more)
initial impressions now.
Can these discussions be made accessible to those of us who will not be present? A skypecast would be ideal, but simpler ways would do, including text transcripts.