| “ | I want to thank *everyone* for being so totally awesome with this process. I've put a lot of work into trying to do this right and the feedback (positive and negative) has been immensely helpful and at times nearly overwhelming :) | ” |
—Developer Chad Horohoe, who oversaw the migration | ||
As scheduled, on March 21 ("Git day"), MediaWiki was officially switched over from the older version control system Subversion to the newer competing system Git. As a result, developers ceased to be able to use Subversion to contribute to core MediaWiki code or over 100 of its WMF-deployed extensions. The switchover went remarkably close to plan, although the preceding code review backlog meant that some 100 revisions had to be initially reverted and then reintroduced afterwards as new-style patchsets. Developers are also now rapidly getting acquainted with the new code review system Gerrit, the Git-friendly replacement to the MediaWiki-based Subversion code review system that had been in use for years. Non-WMF-deployed extensions remain Subversion-based, though many will be moved over to Git in the coming weeks.
The changes sparked numerous threads on the wikitech-l mailing list as developers started to come to grips with the issues arising from the switch. Such issues ranged from working out the changes a developer made when amending a patchset to creating naming conventions and figuring out how to download MediaWiki releases and other snapshots directly from the central Git repository. A separate thread addressed problems in assigning ChangeIds (a vital new identifier used for code review) during merges and part-merges, whilst the question of managing Gerrit user permissions (such as the ability to approve code) was described in significant detail in another thread by Volunteer Development Co-ordinator Sumana Harihareswara. Overall, there seemed to be a sense of cautious optimism among the developer community that all the glitches and performance bottlenecks could be resolved in time.
Director of Platform Engineering Rob Lanphier described the way ahead: "In the short term, we're still deploying [to Wikimedia wikis] from Subversion... [so] all non-urgent deployments should hang on until we finish the work here ... We're currently planning security releases [see In brief] for 1.17, 1.18, and 1.19, which will be released from Git. In the medium term, we plan to have far more frequent deployments, starting as early as April 9. ... With the combination of Git and the workflow changes it enables, we're pretty excited by our new ability to deploy code more frequently, and we're pretty optimistic that we'll be able to actually get that benefit sooner rather than later".
The latest features developed for Wikipedias' mobile site variants will be going live to beta users immediately, it was announced this week. The updates being deployed include "changes to the footer, a cleaner design for revealing and hiding sections, and a revamped full-screen search experience", the announcement revealed.
One new feature that has the potential to make it in some form into the desktop site is the inclusion of an "in place" citation display system. Under the new system being introduced, [1][2][3]-style links on the mobile site will prompt a simple dismissible overlay of the content of the citation (pictured right), rather than scrolling the browser down to the applicable references section. The WMF team behind the update are keen to receive as much feedback as possible on this and all other aspects of the update, according to Software Developer Jon Robson, who made the announcement. He asked users interested in testing out the new features to opt-in to using them and then to try browsing their Wikipedia's mobile site (e.g. http://en.m.wikipedia.org), reporting any problems to a dedicated page on MediaWiki.org.
Improving performance of Wikimedia wikis on handheld devices was targeted as an area of "high strategic significance" in March 2011's product whitepaper, with the particular aim of expanding Wikimedia's audience in areas of the world with comparatively few desktop computers. The latest available statistics show that the mobile site – not to be confused with either the official Wikimedia Android app or its iOS counterpart (both of which attempt to take advantage of device-specific feature sets) – now accounts for over 10% of all Wikipedia page view requests.
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Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
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I tried out the mobile site. Now how do I get back to the normal one? (IE9, have already cleared cache)