Re: Mass-abandonment of many 2+-year-old Gerrit patches to mediawiki/core

I think we do have a problem with patchsets that have bitrotted and no
longer effectively apply, but at the same time what are you supposed to do
if you believe your patch is still a good patch, nobody has ever commented
on it, and there is nothing obviously wrong with it. Its honestly not that
unusual in our community for it to take months to get a patch merged.

--
Brian

On Monday, 30 March 2026, a smart kitten via Wikitech-l <
[email protected]> wrote:

> Earlier today (2026-03-30), all unmerged Gerrit patches to
> `mediawiki/core` that were both attached to a Phabricator task & were 2+
> years old appear to have been abandoned _en masse_: [0]
>
> There was a small amount of discussion after-the-fact in IRC
> (#wikimedia-releng): [1]
>
> I am emailing wikitech-l to announce this myself, as it does not seem like
> this was done by the folks involved in making/actioning this decision.
> Speaking personally, I am saddened that it is apparently the case that
> there was no prior communication about today's action to the Wikimedia
> technical community, and that there was no (or, at least, no _recent_)
> consultation with the wider technical community prior to this highly
> impactful mass-action taking place.
>
> >From the current Gerrit search results at [2] (as viewed while typing
> this email - I'm not sure if Gerrit's search allows for filtering by the
> time a patch was abandoned), it appears that this action may have affected
> ~500-530 individual patches.
>
> There was a Phabricator task filed in May 2025 that proposed the automatic
> abandonment of old changes; however, at the time of this action being
> taken, there had been no comments on that task since May 2025. [3]
>
> Speaking personally again -- I wish that this hadn't happened. I wish
> there had been (wider, and more recent) community consultation. I wish that
> - at the very least - the voices expressing concern in the
> 'auto-abandonment' task [3] had been listened and responded to. That they
> weren't saddens me greatly: why should people take the time to express
> their concerns regarding suggested wide-scale changes such as this, if such
> concerns won't even be acknowledged prior to this sort of mass-action being
> taken?
> Given (e.g.) the thesis quoted in Tyler Cipriani's comment at [4], I am
> also especially concerned about what this sort of action may mean for the
> future health of MediaWiki & other Wikimedia software projects.
>
> I do now hope that these changes can be mass-restored, in the same way
> that they were mass-abandoned; at least, until further community discussion
> on the matter can take place. (But that, I recognise, is an opinion that
> not everyone may necessarily share.)
>
> ---
>
> [0] https://sal.toolforge.org/log/QS3ePp0B8tZ8Ohr0YH3W
> [1] https://wm-bot.wmcloud.org/browser/index.php?start=03%
> 2F30%2F2026&end=03%2F30%2F2026&display=%23wikimedia-
> releng#:~:text=!log%20gerrit%3A%20abandon,Txxxx%60)
> [2] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/q/project:mediawiki/core+is:
> abandoned+before:%222026-03-30+14:00:00%22+after:%222026-
> 03-30+12:50:00%22,500
> [3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T393376
> [4] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T393376#10831729
>
> ---
>
> -- a smart kitten
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/p/A_smart_kitten/
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