On 10/21/10 2:16 PM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
- How deep is the belief that Wikimedia production deployment must
precede a MediaWiki tarball release? Put another way, how tightly are they coupled?
IMO, it's essential that Wikimedia get back to incrementally deploying trunk instead of a separate branch.
I agree with this very strongly.
I would like to know what (if any) arguments there are for doing a separate deploy branch. It seems to me that we ought to be deploying constantly to the website, and making occasional MediaWiki branch releases. On the projects we want timeliness, and downstream MediaWiki packagers want stability,
For what it's worth, I'm influenced by my former job at Flickr, where the practice was to deploy several times *per day*, directly from trunk. That may be more extreme than we want but be aware there are people who are doing it successfully -- it just takes a few extra development practices.
BTW, I wanted to say this stuff earlier, but I found that I couldn't respond meaningfully to Rob's questions. They were "big questions" asking for a lot of context, and a relative newcomer like me is a bit intimidated by those.