Edward Z. Yang wrote:
We've noticed several things:
- When Wordpress 3.0 came out, we received several support tickets asking us when we would be pushing an upgrade, and asked us if anything bad would happen if they went ahead and upgraded their install themselves. We have /never/ had this happen for MediaWiki.
I'm not sure that's comparable. If WordPress complains for being an old version, unsavy users will want it to be upgraded for them. Whereas if they watched the relevant mailing list they probably have the required skills to manually update. (Since they chose a 'managed' mediawiki, it's not that they would be required to do it anyway)
mediawiki 1017 installs 1.5.8 * 118 ++++++ 1.11.0 * 125 ++++++ 1.14.0 * 6 + 1.15.0 * 6 + 1.15.1 | 65 +++ 1.15.2 | 15 + 1.15.3 | 18 + 1.15.4 | 664 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Applications that are on older versions we attempted to upgrade, but had to bail out because there were nontrivial merge conflicts (that is, the user had edited some core files and the upgrade would have obliterated those changes)--there are some exceptions but that is the primary mode by which upgrades failed. The Star means that we offered installation of that version. Our upgrade process was spotty until about a year and a half ago, when we started really making sure we tracked upstream versions closely.
Does that mean that they chose that version despite being outdated? I wonder if all those 1.5.8 installs are due to thinking 1.5 is greater than 1.15
There are certainly some conclusions to be made here, including "When people patch MediaWiki, they patch it in a way that's really hard to upgrade" and "People don't upgrade MediaWiki by themselves" (note that Wordpress has a spread of versions all over the place, whereas every MediaWiki was from a version we supported."
There's probably some interesting knowledge on looking how they patched it, but I don't know how to easily extract it.