On 8 June 2012 10:12, Ryan Lane <rlane32(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The problem
was never IPv6. The problem was always about the unspoken
expectation that everyone else would just drop everything else they have
going on to patch up all the stuff that got broken as a result of this
sudden change. I get that this was an exciting step for the engineers
who
got it done, and I tip my hat to all of them for
pulling it off; from
that
sense it's been a successful implementation.
I also get that at least
30%
of WMF users on hundreds of projects -that's
roughly how many use one or
more gadgets, scripts or tools that didn't work after this switch - have
now had their "editing experience" negatively affected, and that almost
all
of it could have been avoided with a month or two
of notice so that
patches
could be written and resources could be put into
place in advance. One
has
to hope this was a knowledge gap and that
Engineering did not actually
know
the extent to which it would impact the projects
and the end-users.
Are the breakages on the site really that massive? We've been getting
little to no reports of breakages.
From what I understand, most of these breakages are in
tools and scripts
developed and operated by volunteer developers, not WMF
developers. The
big one is Huggle, which on enwp is used by a large majority of admins and
recent changes patrollers. There are additional notes on the enwp village
pump (technical) that appear to be related, although I do not have the
expertise to assess this. I have been told that there are parallel issues
on some of the other large projects, although I don't have direct
knowledge.
If you are asking for us to notify the community earlier, I accept
that. We did this last minute because we wanted to participate on IPv6
day, and we had a few free days to do so right before it. I apologize
that it's poorly affecting your workflow, but your level of anger is
unwarranted. We've been pretty good about announcing things in
general. All user-facing HTTPS changes were announced weeks before
they were made, for instance. Remember, that this is the ops group
you're complaining about, and not engineering as a whole, and we
rarely make user-facing changes.
Yes, the team has been good at giving advance heads-ups, even for things
that are relatively low impact, and it has been a very positive
experience. Thus this unexpectedly short notice is more jarring.
I think one opportunity that was not considered was taking it live on IPv6
Day as a "trial" and then pulling it back to allow everyone else to fix
what didn't work during the trial day. Yes, it is important to test
things; no, it's not necessary to make a permanent change without assessing
the results of the test.
If you are complaining about things being broken, we need to know
exactly what they are, or we can't help. Tell us whats broken here, or
even better, add some bugs.
As I've noted, almost everything I'm aware of that is genuinely not
functioning correctly is stuff that is written by and maintained by
volunteer developers, not the WMF, so bugzillas aren't going to help here.
For non-WMF related reasons, I use very few scripts, gadgets or tools so I
don't have the experience to tell you which volunteer-produced tools are or
are not functioning well.
Risker