This reply is as I understand the situation to be. If anyone else can provide a bit more insight into things, or correct me where I am wrong, I would be grateful.
> Hi, > > What would be the purpose of this organisation and separate community, > exactly? Has there been any demonstrated need or even want for such an > organisation amongst the community it would proportedly serve? > This is something that has been in the works on Wikitech-l for some time now. The folks on Wikitech-l and the WMF have come to the decision that they can't really dedicate the resources required to handle third parties properly (someone correct me if I am wrong on this). They are going to be working with the folks over at Debian, among other places, to get the vary Linux distributions packages up-to-date and keep them up-to-date. They are also going to be giving the installer a little bit more love than it currently has, and working on additional database support. The WMF is paying them for their work. Its a contracted deal to offload some of the development and release tasks that primarily benefit third-party users to someone who can actually dedicate the time and effort to listen to third- party users. Given the luck that enteprise has had in the past at getting some features added to Mediawiki (without coding them ourselves that is), I believe that a need has definitely been demonstrated. As an enteprise user myself, I personally want this and like the idea, so while I can't speak for everyone, at least one person in the community wants it. > I ask in particular because as a third-party sysadmin myself, it's hard > enough following all the relevant discussion and information that > concerns releases as it is already. I think the idea is that they will be consolodating these as much as possible. Though, I will say that I think they should keep using this list as the primary list for enteprise instead of having their own mailing list as well. Unless the enterprise list is to be deprecated. It would be nice to just be able to subscribe to two lists as a third-party user, mediawiki-enteprise-l and announcements-l. > Adding another organisation on top > of that, with its own lists and websites to check and follow, and > another layer of community to go through to get things upstreamed, seems > highly premature when we can't even consolidate the basics (release > notes, date announcements, even testing) at home. I suspect that they will be more able to help third-party users get things upstreamed. Or at least that is my hope. They should also be handling release notes and date announcements entirely now for third-party users (assuming I've understood correctly). I think that this will lead to more consistent and easier to understand release notes and announcements. I can't really say anything about testing. I'm not terribly familiar with any of our testing infrastructure to be honest. > Considering we also have no guarantee that any new organisation would be > more receptive to the needs and concerns of the third-party end users > than the WMF is currently, and there would still be things we would need > to go to the WMF directly about anyway (thus making it even harder to > figure out where to go for something), I find this all very worrying. They are being paid to be more receptive, so I hope that they will be. I should hope that they will also be able to act as a liason between third-party users and the Mediawiki development community. Personally, I don't find it worrying, I actually find it quite refreshing. Its about time third-party users were treated as first-party citizens! :D Thank you, Derric Atzrott _______________________________________________ Mediawiki-enterprise mailing list Mediawiki-enterprise@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-enterprise
