On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 3:04 PM, Greg Grossmeier greg@wikimedia.org wrote:
Let's move our MediaWiki deploy cycle to weekly instead of 2-week. This will also reduce the number of standing deployment windows throughout the week by having those projects/teams simply "ride the MediaWiki train."
\o/
It takes up to 2 weeks for new features/bug fixes to be rolled out to the various Wikimedia wikis.
3.5 weeks, actually. Consider if something was merged in the afternoon on April 29. It just missed getting into 1.22wmf3, so absent backporting it would have to wait for 1.22wmf4, which finishes being deployed everywhere on May 22.
This has been talked about a bit, including during the last In Town Week for WMF Engineering in late-February. I've coalesced on one proposal at: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments/One_week
This seems like a reasonable approach to me. Please respond here or on the talk page with comments/suggestions/etc.
One other plan that was discussed in February, if I recall, was something like this:
week0, Thursday: Deploy wmf1 to test and mw.org week1, Monday: Deploy wmf1 to first-round wikis week1, Thursday: Deploy wmf1 to remaining wikis and wmf2 to test and mw.org. week2, Monday: Deploy wmf2 to first-round wikis week2, Thursday: Deploy wmf2 to remaining wikis and wmf3 to test and mw.org. etc.
That has the advantage of preserving the separation of test+mw.org from the more user-focused wikis, as Sumana mentioned.
-- Brad Jorsch Software Engineer Wikimedia Foundation