On Fri, 06 Dec 2013 08:53:36 +0100, Guillaume Paumier gpaumier@wikimedia.org wrote:
Developers would be ideally-placed to help identify noteworthy changes that will affect Wikimedia users, but most find that activity about as interesting as writing documentation, which says something :) Earlier this year, in a discussion about Gerrit keywords, I suggested that we could use them to tag noteworthy changes, in order to make it easier for developers to identify noteworthy changes, while reducing overhead. Unfortunately, the discussion apparently died: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/68183/... In the meantime, sending a short message to the wikitech-ambassadors list, or dumping a gerrit/bugzilla link at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/Next is the best way to make sure something is communicated to Wikimedians who have subscribed to be informed of tech-related changes likely to affect them. I have ideas on how to improve things in the long term, but I'm open to other suggestions to improve things in the shorter term as well.
The reason tech news are not updated is because it has to be done after the patch is merged. The merger will almost always assume it's the patch creator's responsibility (which is reasonable to me, personally).
Then, the patch creator will… * likely not even notice the merge happening if he ignores mails from gerrit * just forget to do this * no longer remember what exactly the patch was about which makes writing any notes harder.
We should come up with the way to write "Wikimedia" "release notes"/tech news at the same time we write "end-user" release notes – when creating the patch.