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Schema change procedure documentation blanked, no alternative given for 8 months
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Description

Since the Documentation for creating a schema change procedure was blanked from development policy, DBA s face an increasing amount of confused developers that do not understand what to do and how to proceed, causing stress and frustration on both sides, as well as misunderstandings. Please note that DBA proposed amends to the development policy were not arbitrarily edited, they were approved on an RFC in a public session, as required on the new page:

T112637: RFC: Increase the strictness of mediawiki SQL code and leverage database code blockers for scalability, in particular, T112637#2134651

With additional links to the larger, non-policy procedure at Wikitech for convenience: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Schema_changes

Please note that I am more than understanding those were good faith edits, and I even agree those should not be core development policies on that page, they are extremely useful agreed policies that should be highly visible/findable to developers, so they should be at least *somewhere else* on the mediawiki site. This is not an "edit complain" 0:-D, the blanking is causing actual, organizational production issues at the moment, and this I consider this a documentation bug.

There has been 8 months, enough time to correct the mentioned issue in the comments page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Uvtmdzoq11pbeunp with no response, forcing me to bring this to Phabricator, to prevent me for repeating "yes, this $comonsense_database_good_practice is actually an agreed mediawiki policy".

Event Timeline

It is not in progress, I commented precisely there saying that.

It is not in progress, I commented precisely there saying that.

The idea is that we'll probably just put T220056: MediaWiki database policy and/or guidelines (2019) on last call to make it policy after reading through it and having another look at the next meeting. TechCom is working on it, so it's in progress on our board.

I see, thanks. Again, just to be clear, I don't need this to be an approved policy- I just need something written on mw.org to direct wmf developers & deployers to wikitech instructions because ongoing coordination issues.

I'm merging this into T220056 for now given both are about the same issue and have the same outcome as far as TechCom territory goes.

Creating an unofficial page is always possible. Anyone is free to do so. TechCom doesn't decide over that.

Anyway, I've prioritised this policy within TechCom last month to give it a thorough read. It seems to be good enough in its current state with no major issues. I will propose approving the RFC in this week's TechCom (tomorrow). If accepted, it will be placed on Last Call to become official two weeks later, at which point I'll publish it on mediawiki.org as {{Development policy}}, linked from the mw:Development_policy hierarchy.