Siebrand Mazeland wrote:

It feels like I'm nagging now, because I think it is the 3rd time I ask about it.

In the past three months, it appears to me we have not gotten any closer really to getting MediaWiki 1.16 out of the door. There have been requests to get the FIXMEs in Code Review done. At that time there were 30 or so. By now there are some 64[1].

There are more fixmes because we are making progress with the review. It is not necessary for all fixmes to be resolved before the release. We only need to fix any severe outstanding bugs.

There are about 50 commits every day, and Code Review state changes shows there are fewer than 10 state changes per day on average[2].

Actually the average number of state changes has been somewhat higher than the number of commits. That's why I'm only two weeks behind now, when I used to be three months behind.

I know it is more fun to add new stuff, but most of the MediaWiki instances run on stable MediaWiki "quarterly" releases, of which the last one was r48811 on 30 April 2009, which is a whopping almost over 9 months ago and over 12,000 revs from our current trunk (r61161). We need to provide them with some of the enormous improvements we have made since 1.15.

If you want to help, then I've given advice previously on how you can do that. I'm not going to tell everyone to stop committing new features, because I think volunteer developers would get bored and find some other project to work on if I did that. However, I am happy to nag people about pending fixmes, and I've been pondering the best way to go about that.

How can we get this MediaWiki 1.16 thing out of a the door and return to a more reliable "quarterly release" schedule - even if that means only 3 versions a year?

Our new staff developers, Priyanka and Mark Hershberger, should be able to help with that next time around. They are helping this time, but the amount they can do is limited because they are new to MediaWiki.

-- Tim Starling