Code push ongoing

[fu]

Starting the push, will post again when things are done.

(And if you're wondering that this seems early -- I miscalculated timezones. I meant my Tuesday (+8GMT), and misspoke, oops!)

Comments

[yukinoomoni]

I've never thought to ask but....what's a code push?

[denise]

Basically, when we code new things (features, bugfixes, etc) we don't code it and then put it right onto DW itself -- we "check in" the code to our code repository, and then people can work with the most up-to-date version of the code in their development environment for a little bit and find any obvious bugs. That way, we know that we're reasonably certain not to have any major, epic, "oh my god what the HELL just happened?" type bugs on the site itself -- all that gets caught well before it goes on dreamwidth.org.

(Key to understanding this is the idea that Dreamwidth is actually two things: dreamwidth.org, aka the site you're reading this on, and the Dreamwidth source code, which is the programming bits that power the site. We work on the Dreamwidth source code, not on dreamwidth.org itself, for the most part.)

So, every few weeks or so, we say, okay! We think that the development branch of the code is reasonably okay right now! Let's update the site! And we take the dreamwidth.org site and update it to use the most recent version of the Dreamwidth source code -- that's a "code push". (We're 'pushing' the code from the repository to the actual production site.)

This is why you'll see new features, changes, etc, mentioned in the weekly code tours in dw_dev, but can't use them yet -- we finished coding it, but we haven't yet "pushed" it.

[yukinoomoni]

That explains a lot. I really appreciate this. Thank you!