Last modified: 2014-04-17 19:46:54 UTC
REL1_23 has been branched, and MediaWiki 1.23.0 is expected to be released by the end of May. http://git.wikimedia.org/log/mediawiki%2Fcore.git/refs%2Fheads%2FREL1_23 http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2014-April/076002.html It contains [mediawiki/core.git] / skins / vector / variables.less @content-heading-font-family: "Linux Libertine", Georgia, Times, serif; Please consider reverting in REL1_23 the font choices for headers applied to the MediaWiki master branch the past weeks. They are known to cause problems and unintended behavior in Chinese / Japanese / Korean, and perhaps other non-Latin scripts. The work to define font choices for MediaWiki is ongoing, and currently it is too unstable and risky to be pushed in an official MediaWiki release. Once the implementation is settled in the master branch, it can be pushed to the corresponding MediaWiki release.
This sounds like a very reasonable thing to do to avoid i18n support regression, especially since 1.23 will be a long-term support release.
Per bug 63817 any serif whatsoever will cause some issues for Japanese-speaking users on older versions of IE. That is practically speaking the worst issue; other complaints are more stylistic (e.g. old style numerals feeling weird in CJK, which does not normally have such a style). https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/125760/ should allow us to have our cake and eat it too by providing alternative style declarations for CJK. In the meantime, removing them from the general MediaWiki release seems fine to me, provided this will not impact what is deployed on wmf sites.
Change 127132 had a related patch set uploaded by Nemo bis: Remove font choices from REL1_23 branch while the implementation is unstable https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/127132
Change 127132 merged by jenkins-bot: Remove font choices from REL1_23 branch while the implementation is unstable https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/127132
Done, for 1.23 release branch only.
