On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 9:41 PM, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
But it's also true that there were other bugs buried in code that had been changed 8-9 months previously, making it harder to track them down -- and much more difficult to revert them if a fix wasn't obvious. I certainly experienced that during the 1.17 deployment, and received the same impression from other developers at the time.
For a concrete example, see http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/83544 and follow-up commits. I made that commit shortly after 1.17 deployment, working with Roan to resolve a bug in my categorylinks rewrite. It turned out that I got confused by my own variable naming and completely broke non-uppercase collations in the process of fixing the bug that was visible on Wikimedia. That required effort by translatewiki.net to track down the bug again more than a month later. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have made that mistake if I had been writing the fix two weeks later instead of six months later.