On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 11:55 AM, Quim Gil <q...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > > Ok, just a question as humble 3rd party MediaWiki user and technical > volunteer coordinator at the WMF: is there a possibility to consider having > a regular free software release process? > > master/unstable ---> (testing releases?) ---> stable releases
We already do have that. Except you're assuming Wikipedia would run on the testing or stable release rather than on master/unstable. In other words, you want to go back in time a few years. That's about how it used to be a few years ago, although it got to the point of waiting many months rather than a few extra weeks to get anything fixed that wasn't a major security bug or performance issue. And then the upgrades were huge deals with hundreds of bugs having to be tracked down. Most people seem to be happy to have gotten away from that and to the point where it's at most 3.5 weeks[1] between something being merged and it being live on all the sites. And there's talk about increasing the pace further. Now the main problem seems to be finding someone to +2 patches in Gerrit. > Having English Wikipedia using whatever version they have the muscle to pull > and maintain, but moving them out of the very middle of the release process. You're focusing too much on the English Wikipedia, IMO. All the sites get updated on the same cycle. > Potential disadvantages? > > * Changing the process takes work: inertia, resistance and actual changes. > > * Perhaps WMF maintainers having to discuss and lobby more with the rest to > push / rush features into releases. > > * Perhaps English Wikipedia having to wait some more weeks for certain > features. * Everything has to be reviewed once for inclusion in MediaWiki and then again for it to be launched to WMF sites, which takes away time for WMF contributors to work on improvements. [1]: Example: If something were merged on Feb 4 just after wmf9 was branched, it would go up on Feb 25 (3 weeks later) to enwiki with wmf10 and Feb 27 to the other Wikipedias. And Feb 20 for all the non-Wikipedia sites. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
