Ok, Rob’s starting to clear out some of the FlaggedRevs setup requests, now that we’ve cleaned up some of the configuration files.
For today we’ve set up en.wikibooks.org as requested.
If everything’s going smoothly there, we’ll start chugging through the rest over the coming days.
I’ve got MediaWiki on the live Wikimedia sites all up to date at r43514 now.
We’d been updating some extensions individually over the last couple weeks, but full updates were held back as general code review got a little behind during the lead-up to the fundraiser and our staff meeting last week… I’m hoping to get us on a regular weekly update schedule, probably Tuesdays since my experience is that Mondays end up totally unproductive. :)
I did have to pull back the Special:Search redesign for the moment; it’s looking *awesome* but has a few glitches still, which I’m hoping we can resolve before putting it live.
See my comments on issues I noticed in the revert.
I’m thinking we should start making more active use of branches for experimental/iterative development like this, where existing features in core are majorly refactored and need some iterations of testing before going live.
We try to keep our trunk code ready-to-run at all times, so when something in trunk is not quite ready yet we end up rolling it back (which requires tracking down multiple changes and reverting all of them) or else rushing fixes so we can get an update pushed out.
The SVN server was updated to 1.5 a while ago, which is apparently a little handier at branch merging, but branching still is kind of awkward in SVN. Any good recommendations on SVN-friendly DVCSs? I know some folks use SVK or a GIT-SVN bridge for doing various local development, but how easy is it to share a development branch among multiple developers over time this way?
While Google’s Android mobile platform is still vaporware insofar as there’s no products in peoples’ hands yet, there is an SDK already out, and under much freer terms than the iPhone’s. ;)
Like the iPhone, Android includes a very capable WebKit-based browser. I’ve updated our HawPedia-based mobile gateway to recognize both the iPhone SDK emulator and the and Android’s browser, so you get properly ‘mobile-sized’ output on them instead of it thinking they’re “desktop” browsers and wrapping the page with a simulated cell phone image….
Unlike the iPhone, Android apps will potentially run on a wide variety of devices with different capabilities… but for those able to determine their physical location, there will be a standard API for location-based services, so it should be possible to make an Android version of our yet-to-be-finalized location-based Wikipedia search as well. Neat!