Hi Isarra,
Why is this ahead of schedule? Two months before
release
seems pretty reasonable to me;
You don't want to rush this stuff, especially when
balancing with breaking changes in the next release.
It's ahead of the planned release schedule [1] by a few weeks. The real issues
is, though, that the branching was not announced a week beforehand, as planned. As you
point out, the whole tarball release of a major version should not be done in a rush. This
also implies giving developers, especially when it comes to extensions, some time ahead to
include their work (in progress) into the branch without a lot of backporting.
Also, 1.24 has already had wmf22 branched.
Shouldn't this
mean master should be going onto 1.25 now anyway?
IMHO, the issue is that we have no clear responsibilities here. The Foundation sets the
date for switching to wmf1.2x+1. Probably this should this be the trigger for the 6 week
tarball release process. On the other hand, we have a monthly tarball release cycle and
announced dates for releases which a lot of non-WMF users refer to. So we need to
coordinate this. Mind you, I do not want to totally stick to the 6 week process we have
lined out, there is of course flexibility. But it needs some coordination before the
branching is acually made. I assume it is within the responsibilities of WikiReleaseTeam
to make sure this coordination takes place (in the future). Personally, I also think the
WikiReleaseTeam should do the acutal branching and communication about this.
Let me be clear about one thing: this is a matter of unclear responsibilites. I'm not
blaming anyone personally for what they did. Let's clarify the process (maybe here on
this list) and make _better_ mistakes tomorrow :)
Best,
Marks
[1]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WikiReleaseTeam/Release_timeline