Hi everyone,
The code review team has been doing a fantastic job of clearing out
the backlog, which you can see here:
http://toolserver.org/~robla/crstats/crstats.html
(uncheck "ok" on the checkboxes on the bottom to see new commits)
There's some release planning issues that we have to sort out:
1. When will we branch 1.17?
2. When will we push 1.17wmf1 to production?
3. When will we release MediaWiki 1.17?
Trevor and Roan believe that ResourceLoader will be ready to deploy in
January. However, looking at the backlog of code reviews, and I don't
think it's realistic to assume we'll have everything else ready in
January. My assumption here is that we need to be through the code
review backlog prior to pushing what is currently in trunk into
production. Simply extrapolating from the October/November rate of
code review, March is looking more like the target, and that assumes
we keep up the rapid pace of review. What seems realistic without
being complacent?
One thing I think will help the rate of code review is for more
developers to comment on commits more frequently. I know many of you
already chime in on Code Review, which is great. If you can do your
best job at providing a full code review (commenting rather than
marking "ok"), that will hopefully catch some of the most immediate
problems so that the code review team can focus on the more subtle
issues and perhaps do a quicker review. Longer term, Roan has a new
feature brewing to the Code Review system ("sign-offs") that will make
it easier for you to provide some useful metadata for the code review
team to use.
With respect to MediaWiki 1.17 releases, I think we can actually
release sooner after the first production deployment than we did after
1.16 if we pair our usual testing with some small amount formal QA and
test automation (especially focusing on installer and a small amount
of alternate DB testing [e.g. sqlite]) What seems realistic here?
Longer term, everyone has stated a desire to move to more frequent
deploys. I think that's a conversation worth having, but let's not
have it as part of this thread.
Thanks
Rob