On 15 April 2011 06:53, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
- Less hassle for non-Wikimedia users, since upgrades between major
releases require more work. Extensions break, patches break, DB upgrades need to be done.
People upgrade seldom. If we have one release per year it is likely that the code they upgrade to is already so old nobody remembers how it works.
- Less branches to backport to. This reduces the amount of work that
needs to be done to backport security fixes and other bug fixes. We drop support for branches based on time elapsed, not number of versions released.
I agree with this one, although I'm not the one who feels the pain here.
- Less branches to test against. If you're writing an extension that
is meant to work on multiple MediaWiki versions, it will be easier if there are less versions that you need to test against, and potentially write special-case code for.
On the other hand, with few releases far and between, I need to write lot of compatibility code in Translate extension to even support the latest stable release and trunk at the same time. Having branches for different releases for my extension sounds like a lot of effort to maintain them, not even speaking about supporting them.
But all of this is moot, since you're proposing 3 releases per year and I'm complaining about having only one or two releases per year. Three releases would be enough for me.
-Niklas