MediaWiki 1.17/roadmap

On December 3rd/4th (depending on your time zone), a group of developers on #wikimedia-dev (Trevor, Bryan, Roan, Robla, others) quickly drafted a branch plan for 1.17.

MediaWiki developers, please review and comment on this draft!

Proposal
To get 1.17 out the door as quickly and sanely as possible, we'd like to propose:

Check up-to-dateness make-wmf-branch script? (Seems to be missing a few extensions?)
 * 1) Branch on Tuesday, December 7
 * 2) Assign engineering resources to fix remaining bugs
 * 3) Assign engineering resources to support Tim in any way he needs to deploy 1.17
 * 4) Assign engineering resources to merging in bug-fixes (Roan! Maybe Chad could help?)
 * 5) Mark H should be available to help out as well (Mark?)
 * 6) What is Aryeh's status within WMF currently?

Release manager
Tim is the Release Manager and in this role has been responsible for merging bug fixes into the release branch. It is proposed that the "dirty work" such as merging in revisions is done by others, namely Roan, Hashar, Chad, and anyone else that feels up to it.

Schedule

 * 1) Announce branching a few days before (i.e. now)
 * 2)  Branch on Tuesday afternoon UTC (Roan). This way everybody has their first office day (Monday) to have their say about the branching.
 * 3)  Fix bugs
 * 4)  Deploy roughly January?
 * 5)  Fix bugs, deploy, repeat
 * 6)  Release when it's ready

Major / critical bugs

 * - Output is double-compressed if compression enabled prior to script start (Roan)
 * - Extension style-sheets are loaded after user style-sheets (patched by Trevor in r77693, pending review)
 * Monobook broken in IE6 with RL (fixme on r74996). Would like Trevor to take this (this should also be reported as a bug)
 * - Installation/ Upgrade impossible when database name contains hyphen (Chad?)
 * Need to confirm this, but yes, needs to be fixed if it's broken since that'd be a regression. -- Chad

We should probably review the RELEASE-NOTES file and split it in small sections. (of related changes? Should also check it for obsolete stuff that got taken out, I guess). We could have a section with critical bugs.
 * Not important IMO, we've been structuring R-L the same way since forever (config changes / enhancements / bug fixes / api changes). 1.17 isn't any bigger a release than 1.16 was. -- Chad

Niceties / possibly important in real deployment

 * - Port remaining skins to ResourceLoader (Trevor or anyone interested)
 * Would not be a big problem if deferred to 1.18 I think -- Bryan
 * As long as they're verified not to break, it should be fine
 * I think some skins are currently broken, definitely needs checking! -- Chad
 * - Resource loader doesn't respect $wgStyleDirectory (Trevor or anyone interested)
 * Not relevant to WMF deployment at least, we don't use $wgStyleDirectory there. (Should probably be fixed before release though) [interesting!]

Other issues / things to do

 * Gadgets? - there's a new version of the gadgets extension which uses RL, this needs testing - what's the status of this?
 * Apparently working fine on TW (Since MaxSem's rewrite)
 * Need to set up a prototype for testing 1.17, including popular gadgets and stuff (Roan)
 * Would be nice to get CR stats for all WMF code (including WMF-enabled extensions) rather than either repo-wide or just phase3
 * Need a proper list of which extensions are in use (how up-to-date is make-wmf-branch/default.conf ?)
 * ls /branches/wmf/1.16wmf4/extensions