Last week I saw this in a WMF internal chat: "Now we just need to make it a weeee easier to edit the Deployments calendar. (or…is there an easier way than squinting at wikitext tables and copy/pasting templates?)"
I'm sure that a number of y'all can relate to this. The https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments page is pretty nice to read as a human and not too bad for bots. Editing it though can be a bit painful as that pull quote implies. I decided I would try to do something about that. The result is a tool at https://schedule-deployment.toolforge.org/.
The new "Wikimedia Deployment Scheduler" tool tries to make adding your Gerrit change to a backport window as simple as possible. All it needs from you is the Gerrit change number, your IRC nick, and the backport window you want to use. Using some python magic, including the always useful mwparserfromhell library, it finds the right place in [[wikitech:Deployments]] to insert your request for deployment.
To make things even easier, Gerrit will now show you a "Schedule backport of this change" link underneath the commit message for changes that are eligible for a backport deployment. What changes are those? Any open, unmerged change on the master branch of operations/mediawiki-config.git or changes on "wmf/*" branches in mediawiki/core.git, mediawiki/extensions/*.git, or mediawiki/skins/*.git.
Thanks to Antoine Musso and Tyler Cipriani for their help and encouragement in building this tool. If you are interested in seeing what the Gerrit integration needed, check out https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/plugins/gitiles/operations/software/gerrit/+/7ea913b^!/
Bryan