On 21 September 2010 18:09, Rob Lanphier <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 9:36 AM, David Gerard <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Arbitrarily declaring "release time!" from trunk for untested code >> means development is effectively forked between trunk-to-tarball and >> the WMF version. > No one is suggesting that we be completely arbitrary. I didn't say "completely"; however, picking a release date with no consideration of baking the code in production does seem arbitrary. >> (This may then lead to the tarball being volunteer effort and the WMF >> version being paid effort, per Simetrical's note on the subject. I >> submit this might also turn out not to be a good idea.) > Regardless of who gets paid by whom for what, it seems like further > detangling the WMF production release process from the MediaWiki > release process might not be a bad idea. Reifying the fork (so paid developers do WMF and volunteer developers do tarball, and never the twain shall meet again) - rather than fixing it - strikes me as a *terrible* idea, as someone with cause to use the tarball. The fairly obvious consequence of your plan is an unusable tarball no-one goes near. >> I found really basic bugs in 1.16 betas (e.g. an install bug that made >> it literally impossible to install on a fresh server) that destroyed >> my confidence in 1.16 and left me still installing 1.15.x by >> preference. >> I submit that making the tarball version even less tested than at >> present is not going to get more testing achieved, but less. > I don't think it's a matter of "more" or "less", but rather a question > of dependencies. How much testing did the installer get by being > deployed to production on Wikimedia sites? There is going to be code > that doesn't get tested at all (e.g. installer, sqlite support) solely > by virtue of being deployed in WMF production. So, what do we gain by > putting an arbitrarily long lead time of sitting in production prior > to releasing a MediaWiki tarball? Any of the code actually gets tested and used before you shove out a tarball that you expect people to use. What you've said in that last paragraph is "our testing is inadequate, so let's give up testing entirely." The consequence of what you're proposing is to throw the notion of releasing a useful tarball out. Perhaps WMF is at the stage where it needs to do that. You tell me. - d. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
