I have been asked for a clarification of the term "pencils down". It is meant to indicate that developers would stop working on new features targeting the MediaWiki 1.34 release. Instead, any new features would target MediaWiki 1.35 or later, which would happen by continuing to merge those patches into master. The only work that would continue towards 1.34 would be blockers - critical bug fixes or features close to completion that need to make it into the release. This would happen by merging those patches into master and then backporting them to the REL1_34 branch.

Hopefully that clarifies the term without introducing additional confusion,

Cindy ______________________________ Cindy Cicalese Product Manager, MediaWiki Platform Wikimedia Foundation

On Tue, Sep 17, 2019 at 8:25 AM Cindy Cicalese ccicalese@wikimedia.org wrote:

Hello!

We are beginning the process of working on the 1.34.0 release of MediaWiki. The release is currently scheduled for November 2019.

We anticipate creating the REL1_34 branch on September 30 (aligned with the final Wikimedia alpha 1.34.0-wmf.25), so we are asking for "pencils down" on September 29. Once the REL1_34 branch is cut, any patches that need to get into the release will be in the normal patch master + backport process until the release in November.

If you have any open Phabricator tasks tagged with mw-1.34-release [0], please check to see if they are indeed blockers for the release. If not, please remove the tag from them. Conversely, if there are any blockers that are not tagged with mw-1.34.release, please tag them.

Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about this.

Thanks,

Cindy

[0] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/mw-1.34-release/

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Cindy Cicalese Product Manager, MediaWiki Platform Wikimedia Foundation