On 9/7/07, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
I'd strongly recommend against doing that -- then we have inconsistent state which causes all kinds of fun problems:
newly created wikis get the new fields while old ones don't have them
if the fields then get reverted or changed, we end up with some wikis
with the wrong fields present
- batched updates end up failing because multiple updates stomp on each
other's half-done implementations
- other code gets committed assuming the fields are there, breaking
unexpectedly on the live site
Hmm, okay then. I guess it will involve more work on my part to get a schema change done than putting it on a list and waiting for the roots to decide on a good time to do it. It would be nice if we had such a list, but given the low overall volume of schema changes it might not be worth the effort to set up, I suppose.