Hi,
Recently in the discussions about PHP version support, there have been
some brief tangents about whether MediaWiki should continue to have LTS
releases and what exactly those releases should entail. I'm writing this
to document the current state of LTS in MediaWiki, explain why I use the
LTS release, and what I'd like to see going forward.
The status quo is that we have an LTS release every 4 versions/2 years
(1.19, 1.23, 1.27, etc.). It receives bug and security fixes for 3
years, so people have a year to upgrade from one LTS to the next.
There's also some other stuff on-wiki[1] about special release notes
handling.
From a quick perusal of the 1.23 release notes[2],
nearly all of the
backports are security related, with a few major bug fixes (e.g.
fixing
InstantCommons). I'd make a quick guess that there plenty of bug fixes
that have happened to master since the branchpoint that could be easily
backported, but aren't.
All of the non-dev wikis (and wiki farms!) that I help run currently run
1.23.x. My main reason for doing so is that upgrading major versions
usually takes a few hours for each wiki. They have custom (often
non-published) code or non-Wikimedia deployed extensions that typically
break and require some kind of fixing. Then there's schema changes,
JS/CSS changes, etc. It adds up to something that I don't want to do
every 6 months. (Maybe it would be easier if I did it every 6 months?
I'm not sure.)
Really all I want is a longer support for some arbitrary predetermined
version with regards to security issues so I have to upgrade major
versions less often. :-)
I think LTS is a significant factor to consider when deciding our PHP
version requirements as there is a huge difference between saying we're
going to support PHP 5.4 (or whatever) for 1 year versus 3 years.
I think it would be helpful if other people who use LTS could share
their motivations for doing so, and if the release/security teams could
share what issues make LTS release support problematic or difficult (a
few things have been mentioned on IRC, but I'll let those people speak
for themselves).
[1]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Version_lifecycle#Release_policy
[2]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/MW/browse/REL1_23/RELEASE-NOTES…
Thanks,
-- Legoktm