On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 8:47 PM, Tim Starling <tstarl...@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Anyway, it certainly isn't the case for core contributions, or for > contributions to existing extensions, both of which have a healthy > level of community commits. The problem is limited to new extension > deployments, and perhaps to major core branch merges like IWTransclusion. I agree with this, but also with the fact that extension review is currently broken. Part of the answer, IMO, is going to have to be to trust more volunteers to do lots of legwork on getting extensions ready for deployment. Part of the answer is more systematic resourcing. Right now we're dealing with a flood of new committers across the board (thanks to the lightweight developer access process), so keeping up with changes to core and deployed extensions, and getting onto a two-week deployment schedule from core, is our highest priority internally. Petr, regarding the extensions you're hoping will get deployed, do we have existing test setups in labs (single-instance wiki or deployment-prep) so we can give these more eyes from developers and non-devs alike? If not, would you be willing to set those up? > We're not behaving like Oracle does with Java or MySQL, or like Google > does with Android. We develop code in public repositories and grant > commit access liberally. This is very true. Moreover, we're not merely shipping a software product, but actually installing software on a top 5 web property with a large, active and vocal community. What seems trivial is often not. It's clear that WMF will get plenty of blame if we're seen to "ignore consensus" or install software with unforeseen negative side effects, so any extension, no matter how small or large, can potentially be fairly hairy. We do want to make sure we have eyeballs not just from devs but also from user interface/UX folks where needed. Criticism is warranted and needed. However, I'm always interested in seeing examples of people or organizations who do a better job at solving the same kinds of problems. That would allow us to learn from them, and also add weight to criticism where we're failing to do the obvious. But mostly, these aren't obvious problems. Resourcing to support an ever-changing firehose of suggested changes, many of which should _not_ be made or need improvement, while also making our own pace of continued improvements is inherently hard -- as our problems with new editor retention in the all-volunteer editorial community show. Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
