2010/12/5 Robert Leverington <robert(a)rhl.me.uk>uk>:
On the other hand this creates a huge amount of work
in identifying and
backporting any essential bug fixes between the branch point and HEAD at
branching - I imagine probably more than it alleviates (albeit for
different people).
Yes, there's a balance there. In the post you're replying to I said it
should be considered if unreviewed revisions were skewed towards the
recent ones, but this doesn't seem to be the case for /trunk/phase3 at
least. See
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/mediawiki/wiki/User:Catrope/CR_stats…
for details (left column is a 3-digit revid prefix identifying a range
of 100 revisions, right column is the number of new/fixme revs in that
range): for instance, the past 7 days account for 5% of the review
backlog, the past ~4 weeks for ~10%. However, we've only got good
stats on phase3 at this time; I'll run them on phase3 plus
WMF-deployed extensions tomorrow so we'll have the full picture.
The crux of the above: recent revisions are a tiny fraction of the
review backlog (the last ~4 weeks of commits account for only ~10% of
the backlog), at least for /trunk/phase3. IMO this means there's no
reason to branch off anything other than HEAD. The picture might look
different for WMF-enabled extensions, I'll have stats on them
tomorrow.
Either way this is something that needs to be
considered prior to
branching as it will change the schedule and allocation of resources
(to me the current schedule seems overly optimistic in this respect).
I agree the review backlog won't magically fix itself over the
holidays, which is why I call on everyone who can help to do so or ask
their boss to be 'allowed' to spend time on it (I hear RobLa is
allocating some people's time to this).
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)