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