On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 9:36 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 21 September 2010 17:26, Rob Lanphier robla@robla.net wrote:
Doesn't this kinda depend on what our priorities are and what the priorities of people running MediaWiki are? There are many demands placed by Wikipedia that most websites don't have. In the rest of the software world, high traffic websites are the *last* ones to upgrade, not the first. Don't we want to get the benefit of other people using the software more heavily before we put it on Wikipedia?
Speaking as someone who installs MW from tarball every now and then ... it feels like there's WMF development, for WMF purposes, and there's also an occasional tarball of variable quality.
I've experienced that myself.
Arbitrarily declaring "release time!" from trunk for untested code means development is effectively forked between trunk-to-tarball and the WMF version.
No one is suggesting that we be completely arbitrary.
(This may then lead to the tarball being volunteer effort and the WMF version being paid effort, per Simetrical's note on the subject. I submit this might also turn out not to be a good idea.)
Regardless of who gets paid by whom for what, it seems like further detangling the WMF production release process from the MediaWiki release process might not be a bad idea.
I found really basic bugs in 1.16 betas (e.g. an install bug that made it literally impossible to install on a fresh server) that destroyed my confidence in 1.16 and left me still installing 1.15.x by preference.
I submit that making the tarball version even less tested than at present is not going to get more testing achieved, but less.
I don't think it's a matter of "more" or "less", but rather a question of dependencies. How much testing did the installer get by being deployed to production on Wikimedia sites? There is going to be code that doesn't get tested at all (e.g. installer, sqlite support) solely by virtue of being deployed in WMF production. So, what do we gain by putting an arbitrarily long lead time of sitting in production prior to releasing a MediaWiki tarball?
Rob