Hi everyone, There have been a number of calls to make the release process more predictable (or maybe just faster). There are plenty of examples of projects that have very predictable release schedules, such as the GNOME project or the Ubuntu Linux distribution. It's not at all unreasonable to expect that we could achieve that same level of predictability if we're prepared to make some tradeoffs, such as:
1. Is the release cadence is more important (i.e. reverting features if they pose a schedule risk) or is shipping a set of features is important (i.e. slipping the date if one of the predetermined feature isn't ready)? For example, as pointed out in another thread + IRC, there was a suggestion for creating a branch point prior to the introduction of the Resource Loader.[1] Is our priority going to be about ensuring a fixed list of features is ready to go, or should we be ruthless about cutting features to make a date, even if there isn't much left on the feature list for that date? 2. Projects with generally predictable schedules also have a process for deciding early in the cycle what is going to be in the release. For example, in Ubuntu's most recently completed release schedule [2], they alloted a little over 23 weeks for development (a little over 5 months). The release team slated a "Feature Definition Freeze" on June 17 (week 7), with what I understand was a pretty high bar for getting new features listed after that, and a feature freeze on August 12 (week 15). Many features originally slated in the feature definition were cut. Right now, we have nothing approaching that level of formality. Should we? 3. How deep is the belief that Wikimedia production deployment must precede a MediaWiki tarball release? Put another way, how tightly are they coupled? Thoughts on these? Any other tradeoffs we need to consider? We're going to have a number of conversations over the coming days on this topic, so I wanted to add a little structure and get some (more) initial impressions now. Rob [1] MZMcBride's mail: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2010-October/049969.html ...which in turn references IRC from 2010-10-18 @ 14:08 or so: http://toolserver.org/~mwbot/logs/%23mediawiki/20101018.txt [2] Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat (10.10) release schedule: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MaverickReleaseSchedule _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
