Rob said

--Hi everyone,

Just repeating something I just posted to http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/02/planned-1-17-deployment/

The engineering team is busy working on the deployment of the 1.17 branch of MediaWiki[1].  We plan to roll this out next week to all languages and projects, Tuesday, February 8, with work starting at 07:00 UTC (which is 11pm on Monday, February 7 for San Francisco).

If all goes well, you should only notice the improvement. If it doesn’t go well, that’s because there’s something we missed, and that’s where we’d love your help.  Please help us test this release! We have a test instance of the software we plan to deploy available at http://prototype.wikimedia.org/.  If you find issues, please report them in Bugzilla: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bugzilla

There are many, many little fixes and improvements that have gone into 1.17 (see the draft release notes[2] for an exhaustive list) .  There isn’t much that’s visible to users of the site, but one under the hood improvement that should result in some speed improvements: Resource Loader[3].  Resource Loader optimizes the use of JavaScript in MediaWiki, speeding up delivery of JavaScript by compressing it sometimes, and cutting down on the amount of unused JavaScript that gets delivered to the browser in the first place. Much of the work in this development cycle has been centered on ensuring compatibility with the new system.  Since it makes such a large shift in the way that JavaScript is delivered to the browser, it’s also an operational aspect we’ll be keeping a close eye on, as load shifts between servers in our infrastructure.

Note that this isn’t a release for download, yet.  On and after February 8, the “latest” version of MediaWiki will still be 1.16 as listed on mediawiki.org. We plan to update this to 1.17 sometime after the deployment of the 1.17 branch, after we’ve had time to run it in production for a while and fix the issues we’re likely to find.

So please, help us test this release, and if you find bugs, please report them in Bugzilla.  Thanks!

Rob

[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_roadmap/1.17 [2] http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/branches/REL1_17/phase3/RELEASE-NO... [3] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ResourceLoader [4] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download

Is there any plan to deal with all the JS in mediawiki:Common.js that RL is probably going to break? Admins at wikimedia sites (other then enwikipedia) tend not to really know what they're doing in terms of customizing JS, thus there is a lot of really sketchy js in mediawiki:Common.js that gets copied from site to site and messed around with until it works. Several of the smaller wikis already have broken JS. I imagine that many more will break with the RL, and local admins probably won't know whats wrong/how to deal with it.

Cheers, -bawolff

p.s. Can I get three cheers for 1.17 :D