On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 12:17 AM, Legoktm legoktm.wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
On 05/27/2015 01:19 PM, Greg Grossmeier wrote:
Hi all,
New cadence: Tuesday: New branch cut, deployed to test wikis Wednesday: deployed to non-wikipedias Thursday: deployed to Wikipedias
This means that if we/users spot a bug once the train hits Wikipedias, or the bug is in an extension like PageTriage which is only used on the English Wikipedia, we have to: rush to make the 4pm SWAT window, deploy on Friday, or wait until Monday; which from what I remember were similar reasons from when we moved the train from Thursday to Wednesday.
Recent API breakages suggest that this doesnt give enough time for client tests to be run, bugs reported, fixed and merged.
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T96942 was an API bug last month which completely broke pywikibot. All wikis; all use cases.
It was reported by pywikibot devs almost as soon as we detected that the test wikis were failing in our travis-ci tests. It was 12 hours before a MediaWiki API fix was submitted to Gerrit, and it took four additional *days* to get merged. The Phabricator task was marked Unbreak Now! all that time.
This also doesnt give clients sufficient time to workaround MediaWiki's wonderful intentional API breakages. e.g. raw continue, which completely broke pywikibot and needed a large chunk of code rewritten urgently, both for pywikibot core and the much older and harder to fix pywikibot compat, which is still used as part of processes that wiki communities rely on.
Another example is the action=help rewrite not being backwards compatible. pywikibot wasnt broken, as it only uses the help module for older MW releases; but it wouldnt surprise me if there are clients that were parsing the help text and they would have been broken.
-- John Vandenberg