Hi everyone,
Thank you to everyone who has been reviewing code. Since December 3, there's been a decline from 1183 unreviewed new revisions, to 644 [1] That's the good news. The bad news is that we hadn't done so well in the week prior to that, and we haven't yet made up for lost ground. By the goals set for a 2012-01-31 review completion date[2], we should have been down to 644 "new" sometime during December 5, and 360 is where we should be now. That would seem to put us roughly 8-9 days behind where we wanted to be.
Some of this is keeping the pace on code review, and everyone seems to be doing a more-than-credible job there. However, that effort is going to be wasted if the pace of new code outstrips our capacity to review it. A bunch of us in Platform have been discussing ways to make sure we don't backslide, and came up with a few ideas. We're going to try to get to some important reviews first, as documented on the 1.19 roadmap page[3]. If we can make any ok/revert decisions on these revisions soon enough, and we have to revert, we'll leave ourselves enough time to deal with the consequences.
Speaking about reverting, one pattern the reviewers are going to be especially sensitive to: refactoring without mailing list discussion or any clear consensus. If you're doing core work that's not in service to getting 1.19 finished, and you commit it without discussing it much, don't be surprised if your work is unceremoniously reverted. No one likes being trigger happy about reverting, but we really mean it about needing to finish up 1.19. We need to get caught up for a whole raft of reasons (getting to faster release cycles, getting moved over to Git, getting FileBackend done and deployed for Swift). Even if we weren't in this particular crunch, there's a lot of fatigue about unilateral refactoring decisions. Let's at least talk about them before lobbing them out.
One thing that's been tough about the 1.18 deployment has been that we're just now stumbling into issues that were introduced as early as January of this year. With the 1.19 deployment, we'll not only close that gap quite a bit (only stretching back to July now), but also potentially make it possible to deploy code not long after it's written, even if its committed early in the deploy cycle. Please work with us to get there.
Thanks! Rob
[1] http://toolserver.org/~robla/crstats/ [2] https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Agte_lJNpi-OdDJ... [3] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.19/Roadmap