I wonder if this would be a good candidate for event-based replication?  One drawback is that current streams keep at most one month of data [1], but that might be extended for translations depending on the volume.  Another workaround might be to combine regular releases with a streaming update, for example if a language bundle were released once per month.

This approach might also work well for Wikimedia sites, I wasn't sure from the final question in the email whether or not this is an outstanding technical gap.

Regards,
[[mw:User:Adamw]]

[1] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Event_Platform/EventStreams#Historical_Consumption

Since the beginning of the year, the Wikimedia Language team has enabled translation backports for MediaWiki core, extensions and skins hosted on Gerrit. On a weekly schedule compatible translations from master branch are backpored to all the supported release branches. Currently supported branches are 1.35–1.38.

Translation backports partially replace the purpose of the LocalisationUpdate extension. Wikimedia sites no longer use the extension, and to our knowledge only a few other users of the extension exist, because it needs manual setup to use.

We, the Language team, think that maintaining the LocalisationUpdate extension is no longer a good use of our time. We are asking for your feedback about the future of this extension.

We are planning to:
* Remove LocalisationUpdate from the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle starting from version 2022.07
* Remove us as maintainers of the extension

Additionally, based on the feedback, we are planning to either mark the extension as unmaintained, transfer maintenance to a new maintainer, or request the extension to be archived and removed from the list of extensions bundled with MediaWiki core if there is no indication that anyone uses this extension.

We request your feedback and welcome discussion on https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T300498. Please let us know if you are using this extension and whether you would be interested in maintaining it.

Anticipated questions
Q: What about Wikimedia sites: does this mean they will not get frequent translation updates as they used to have?

A: We still think this is important, but we do not think the previous solution can be restored. We would like to collaborate on new solutions. One solution could be more frequent deployments.

  -Niklas

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