On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 3:38 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
There was a time when the software being run on Wikimedia wikis was updated about weekly. Nowadays, I honestly can't remember the last time it was fully SVN upped and scapped, and the branching has made it nearly impossible for me to figure out where the progress stands. A few "critical" revisions get merged into the 1.16wmf4 branch as necessary, but most revisions are left untouched, as far as I can tell.
This is a real pain, I agree. If you're doing something with the intent that it be used on Wikipedia, it must be pretty demoralizing to not see your changes ever go live. This also greatly increases the headache when we finally do deploy the many months of changes to the live site. And the current practice of deploying some arbitrarily-chosen subset of revisions out of order is prone to cause bugs -- wasn't that what caused us to lose all those images a while back?
I'd like to see if there are ways to get back to more regular site software updates. Should the branching be undone so that trunk has to be usable? Is it a matter of developer man-power? Is it a matter of code review? I'm not trying to be critical, but the current situation seems far less than ideal. I'm willing to help if I can, as I'm sure others are, but it seems like nobody's quite sure what or where the exact problem is.
I'm pretty sure it's a problem of code review. Deployment was already getting erratic in Brion's final months here, as he and Tim couldn't keep up with the pace of new commits, and it pretty much ground to a halt when Brion left. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the problem is we have many more developers than we did two or three years ago, but no more reviewers.
Surely a few paid people can be assigned to make sure everything is reviewed, in place of some of their current coding duties. If we had three or four people doing review, the workload on each wouldn't be terribly great. They might not be as experienced as Brion or Tim, but the worst that happens is buggy software gets deployed once in a while. Which will happen anyway, and we can fix it when it does. I think we long ago passed the point where it's worth the risk.