I recently came across the MediaWiki-backport-deployments tag. A few potential issues occurred to me about the project in its current form, so opening this task to discuss.

• On the surface, it currently seems unclear what the scope of the #MediaWiki-backport-deployments project is. IMO, it could currently be interpreted (and in the past, seems like it may have been interpreted) as being for:
  1. Tasks with patches that are requested/going to be backported (e.g., T232539, T247531#5986291)
  2. Issues/bugs that have occurred when backporting / tasks relating to the tools used to perform the backports (e.g., T207018, T307277, T379044)
  3. Tasks relating to the backport processes themselves (e.g., T223087, T254745)
  4. Tasks that indirectly affect the backport processes in another way (e.g., T197230, T226706)
• Looking at the above, it seems like there might be some overlap between #MediaWiki-backport-deployments & the Deployments tag:
  • Tasks/bugs relating to the tools used to perform backports seem like they'd be best placed under Deployments, which (from its description) is for tasks regarding the "tools to deploy code on Wikimedia servers".
  • The Deployments workboard has a "Backlog (Process)" column, which suggests to me that tasks relating to backport processes themselves might also be best tracked under this tag.
• The current design of the tag seems (on its surface) potentially similar to Train Deployments; however, unlike with train deployments, my understanding is that backport windows/deployments don't currently have specific Phabricator tasks created for them.
• As it currently stands, #MediaWiki-backport-deployments strikes me as being a potentially low-visibility project that tasks might be filed under (as an well-fitting tag); but which then - through nobody's fault - might not receive much future attention, due to not also being tagged with a (more visible) project for the tools/codebases that (e.g.) are causing any issues in question. E.g., T379044 appears to describe an error that occurred running Scap; but the task might currently have limited visibility to the people that deal with issues around running deployment-related tools, due to not also being tagged with Deployments/Scap.

As a possible idea -- if being able to track tasks that specifically affect backport windows/backporting is desired, this tag could potentially be renamed/re-purposed to something like Affects-Backport-Deployments? This would hopefully clarify that it's not intended to be used as a codebase tag/a task's primary project in and of itself (if this is indeed the case!).

To be clear, it's not my intention here to force changes to a Phab project for a process I'm not involved in-- I'm raising this due to the potential issues that came to my mind as someone who spends time on Phabricator, but ultimately any decision here should probably come from the people involved with these processes :)

Tagging Release-Engineering-Team for information/visibility, and as you might know something about the history of this project/whether it's currently desired (and might be the best team to make the call on what happens with this tag!)