Brion Vibber wrote:
Can someone summarize this thread? As far as I can tell someone has invented a requirement that all features be blessed by the WMF Features team, and I'm pretty sure that can't be right. Can it?
MassMessage is a utility, not a feature. :-)
I think Terry, quite reasonably, was concerned about Terry or members of Terry's team being tasked with indefinitely maintaining an extension that Terry and Terry's team had no part in developing. My confusion comes from where Terry got the idea that anyone was asking Terry or Terry's team to get involved here in any capacity.
My understanding is that the MassMessage deployment came up in an internal Wikimedia Foundation meeting and Terry injected himself into this issue. After learning that Terry had an interest, I copied him (and Howie and Fabrice) on the relevant bug and then e-mailed the three of them directly the following week when I didn't hear back from them. This, along with posting to a public wiki, a public bug tracker, and committing code to a public code repository, is what Terry has described as "back-dooring."
In the past day or so, Terry has made a number of claims about Wikimedia development (both past and present) that appear to be undocumented, unsupported, and/or untrue, depending on the claim.
MZMcBride