On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 6:29 AM, Max Semenik maxsem.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On 21.09.2010, 6:09 Rob wrote:
I'm not sure what you mean by this. October 15 would be the branch point, not the release date. Are you saying that we have to release to production one month before even branching off of trunk?
Yes, if we really care what we release.
Doesn't this kinda depend on what our priorities are and what the priorities of people running MediaWiki are? There are many demands placed by Wikipedia that most websites don't have. In the rest of the software world, high traffic websites are the *last* ones to upgrade, not the first. Don't we want to get the benefit of other people using the software more heavily before we put it on Wikipedia?
I realize that this isn't how it's traditionally been done, but then again, I think our tradition has drifted. Once upon a time, trunk was very regularly deployed in production. Providing releases was merely an alternative to telling MediaWiki admins "just go checkout trunk; that's what we're using". Now that we're a lot more cautious about what we put into production, we should question whether we still need to be even more cautious about what we release as MediaWiki.
Currently, trunk is quite broken due to Resource Loader and other things, which is absolutely understandable: no one can write a major feature that works flawlessly from commit one. Even in best scenario it will take at least a couple of weeks to be ready for Wikipedia. Then, there are lots of other things, and even more will be revealed during a thorough code review. And you shouldn't even try to assume that RL will work smoothly once rolled out to the WMF cluster - more fixes will be needed, as experience with previous JS-heavy Usability Initiative features shows.
To summarize: we will have more or less sane code in 6-8 weeks from the time when our next CR begins. Only then it will make sense to branch for at least one month of final bug-squashing before releasing. All schedules faster than this are unrealistic. If WMF wants to keep a predictable release schedule, they should aim for full scaps at least once per month.
Assuming that ResourceLoader is still in pretty rough shape a month from now, then yeah, there's no point trying to foist that on MediaWiki users, no more than it will make sense pushing it to Wikimedia sites.
Rob