Hi!
Soooo, it's that wonderful time of year where we start prepping for a new general release of MediaWiki! This one will be 1.28.0, and it'll be based on all of the 1.28 wmf branches we've been doing over the past 6 months.
Step 1 is cutting the branch, which I plan to do tomorrow from the same branch point which we cut the 1.28.0-wmf.23. This is slightly different, in that we won't be cutting from master a few days after the WMF branch, and takes some of the pressure off of creating 1.29.0-wmf.1 the following week.
So here's the timeline: Tomorrow (Oct 25) - Cut REL1_28 from wmf.23, master goes to 1.29-alpha Tues (Nov 1) - First deployment of 1.29 to WMF [wmf.1, obviously] Wednesday (Nov 2) - Do rc.0 [giving us a few days for any backports that came up in wmf.23 rollout] Following two Wednesdays (Nov 9, 16) - Do rc.1 and rc.2 Wednesday (Nov 23) - Final release of MW
I'll be updating MW.org shortly.
Tyler Cipriani's assisting me with this release, so expect to see some RCs with his name (and signatures) on them :)
-Chad