On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 10:12 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
Another advantage is that we'd have a major version number that we can say Wikimedia is running on. We had three deployments of 1.16 and there may be a fourth before we branch it and start on 1.17, but these branch points are unnamed. Instead we could call them 1.16wmf1, 1.16wmf2 and 1.16wmf3 in Special:Version, and we could keep track of when those updates were deployed, so that users would have a better idea of how to talk about the software that we're running.
I would suggest calling them 1.16wmf-rXXXXX, putting the version number of the original branch point in $wgVersion and the branch name. Also, remove the automatic SVN revision indicator from Special:Version if the wiki isn't running off trunk. That way when we say "Committed as rXXXXX", we can again tell people to wait until the revision given on Special:Version passes that for the feature to be live.
Of course 1.16wmf-rXXXXX will mean rXXXXX plus some possibly large number of extra revisions, but the revision on Special:Version always meant that, and it's still useful info: rXXXXX and all previous revisions are in the branch (plus possibly some later ones).