On Fri, 06 Dec 2013 08:53:36 +0100, Guillaume Paumier <gpaumier(a)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.
--
Matma Rex