I'd like to see MediaWiki gain a more stable release process as well. I think some of the primary things that we're lacking are:
- Where is QA? I mean, I know somewhere somebody is probably doing some sort of testing, but having worked as a QA engineer I haven't seen anything in MW that would resemble proper and traditional testing (excluding the unit testing). Where's the list of test cases that need to be performed for each release? How can one make new test cases and add them? etc. Maybe this already exists, but if it does it's definitely not documented well enough. - Stable sets of expected release features. In most companies I've worked in, every single bug upon being reported is immediately scheduled for a release, even if it just means deferring it to an unknown "Future Release". But doing a quick search in Bugzilla shows MW has 5000+ bugs that are not scheduled, some of which are even high priority bugs. I've probably said this before, but it'd be good if consumers knew beforehand what they may expect in the next MW release (even if it's only tentative) so that they can debate whether or not to prepare for an upgrade. I've been told before that that's what the release notes are for, but that's not the point. Release notes currently only include stuff that's already done. - Faster review process. This is something that's not at all easy, and I know many are aware, but it takes a while to get reviews. I mean, there are people like me who get notifications for every new change in gerrit, and thus I'll see everything even if I wasn't added as a reviewer, but not everybody does that, which leaves the question of how to get your stuff reviewed and who to go to. There's a list of MW.org that has some people, but I've found it's usually not helpful until you're more involved and actually know who those people are. Other than those process issues, there are a few feature issues that IMO I think are holding people back: - As said, DB support, especially for high-use systems like Postgres and MSSQL. - Enterprise platforms. What if I want to deploy MW onto AWS or VMWare? Many companies have pre-packaged systems for this. For example, at the company I'm working at now, deploying their product to AWS is as easy as copying the ID number into the web GUI and clicking deploy. Also, is there any tracking on HipHop support? - Non-PHP. This is probably far off in the future, but eventually it'd be nice to be able to setup MW without having to deal with PHP at all, i.e., have a configuration file in YAML or something. Even PHP frameworks like Symfony have abstracted out the PHP, and that's a case where you're actually developing *in* PHP. :P *--* *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2015 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerro...@gmail.com On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 1:01 PM, OQ <overlo...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 11:39 AM, Mark A. Hershberger <m...@everybody.org> > wrote: > > But right now, I don't sense a huge amount of friction between the WMF's > > needs and the non-WMF MediaWiki-using community. The most that can be > > said is that the WMF is focused on its sites and doesn't make third > > party use a priority. This doesn't stop support for other databases, > > though: Oracle, MS SQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, or even my recent changes to > > separate out DB schema changes in MySQL. > > Yes, unfortunately schema changes and other DB related changesets tend > to only get applied to MySQL/SQLite, and the other DBs tend to get > ignored or lag behind by a few months. That's about my only gripe, > that, and that setting jenkins up for these other backends was never > completed. > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
