One more vote for this.
Upgrades have generally caused us much pain with little or no obvious
benefit. In our particular case, Mediawiki works well enough as is.
Until our host decides to update PHP forcing us to upgrade Mediawiki,
and discovering that it no longer works.
While there may be things we might like improved, we can't afford to
dedicate a full time Wikimedia guru to becoming expert in the hidden
corners of the code and keeping up with every change that might have
some unexpected side effect.
I realize that some of the changes are security fixes, and a Good Thing,
but I suspect these are in the minority. Our wiki is not public, so we
could probably get away with being a bit more lax about that, but when
Mediawiki is suddenly no longer compatible with php version-whatever, we
have no choice but to upgrade.
>
> I'm afraid you've got a point there, Boris. Your not alone.
>
> Contrary to you, I 've (up to now) tried to keep everything up to date. I
> must now admit that the advantages of doing so are rapidly vanishing. Too
> often this ends in a time consuming trial and error, leading into fault
> messages and malfunction, hence a loss of confidence. I think I will change
> policies and keep things as they are until I notice a more coherent upgrade
> approach.
>
> On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 9:34 PM, Boris Steipe <boris.steipe(a)utoronto.ca>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> I hold off updates as long as at all possible, the reason being that over
>> the last years new versions of the software have almost never come with
>> tangible benefits to my core use. It is almost always just fixing
>> edge-cases we don't care about and better support for things we don't use.
>> Why? Because we have developed a workflow around the software as it existed
>> about three years ago and there is really no reason to change that. The
>> benefit of not using the latest is that we get to skip releases and frankly
>> every single release just takes way, way to long to install and verify and
>> fix across our multiple Wikis. Every release I can skip gives me half a day
>> of my life!
>>
>> The release cycles are too short. As far as I'm concerned, MediaWiki works
>> oK, if it would do just what it does; that would be nice, and aspiring to
>> anything else is just not what I'm interested in. The only reason why I'm
>> constantly on the lookout for alternatives to MW are the frequent
>> required/recommended updates.
>>
>> I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this.
>>
>> Now, if a new version would come out that would autoupdate and configure
>> itself and make sure it keeps on working with my (completely standard)
>> extensions, that would be nice. Too modern?
>>
>>
>> Boris--
-------------------------
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