Forum:Changes to Orain's deploy cycle - We want your opinion

Hello everyone.

In light of the recent changes we have made to Orain - I am opening up to the community a chance for non-system administrators to have a chance to weigh in on proposals for changes to how Orain deploy cycle for MediaWiki.

Currently Orain aims to keep up to the date with the latest stable releases (currently 1.23.2). The latest upgrade was done on July 30th by myself. 

Currently there are two proposals on the table from myself. I will give a paragraph explaining how we will keep up the date in each case and who would be responsible for doing them usually. At the end I will provide a section for the community to propose ideas to us and we will decide of whether these would be a) feasible and b) technically advantageous. This is purely to give the community a chance to give an input in a process which will affect everyone and the communities as well.

This will stay open until participation dies out (1 week minimum however) and will be closed a system administrator prior to an announcement being made. John (talk) 23:25, 4 August 2014 (BST)

Proposal 1: Use Wikimedia Foundation builds
The use of wmf/* builds will result in weekly upgrade of MediaWiki and extensions. This may make the service we provide unstable as extensions may not be compatible but new versions or upgrades may go wrong. If the community wish to implement this method; we will keep two branches available for use. These will include the last wmf build we've used and the stable 1.24 version (a version soon to be released). Mostly, I will be responsible for deploying these upgrades and during the time will be available in #orain on freenode and will be watching several wikis to ensure upgrades go smoothly as well as the error logs we have stored.

The latest wmf builds have been laden with features to remove administrative power and site autonomy, rushed, and buggy. Case in point: superprotect. Cannot oppose strongly enough. Vorticity (talk) 00:55, 11 August 2014 (BST)
 * Comments/Votes
 * Mostly due to the easy rollback capabilities and the availability of some bleeding edge Beta Features that otherwise work poorly or not at all on the current stable releases. Arcane (talk) 14:51, 5 August 2014 (BST)
 * What about security fixes? As this is a weekly release, does that mean we are faster equipped with all security fixes than when we would use the stable release? Southparkfan (talk) 12:20, 10 August 2014 (BST)
 * Yes. Any backports and hot fixes will also be deployed either weekly or as they are patched as necessary. John (talk) 12:54, 10 August 2014 (BST)
 * I prefer this one. &mdash; ReviComplaint?  14:23, 10 August 2014 (BST)
 * Actually this is a Wikimedia-only thing. This is irrelevant.  John (talk) 02:25, 11 August 2014 (BST)
 * Superprotect - the most abusive thing in 2014 by WMF -is only for Wikimedia project. &mdash; ReviComplaint?  14:01, 11 August 2014 (BST)

– If it's used by WMF, it's probably secure enough. As long as this isn't going be any less secure for WMF sites. Lieutenant S., Geschichtsmeister des Lexipedium (talk) 14:39, 11 August 2014 (BST)

Proposal 2: Use stable builds
The use of stable builds will result in monthly minor upgrades and a major upgrade either bi-yearly or yearly. This will reduce the likelihood of issues being introduced but will mean new features are deployed less often and limits us with latest releases of new extensions. These builds will have no rollbacks easily available. Mostly, I will be responsible for deploying these upgrades and during the time will be available in #orain on freenode and will be watching several wikis to ensure upgrades go smoothly as well as the error logs we have stored.


 * Comments/Votes

Other proposals

 * Ability to embed YouTube videos, a capability recently provided by Shoutwiki.