One of the key reasons I use and recommend LTS is that upgrading version to version can sometimes be a nightmare. Off hand I can think of the composer and skin repo changes that each took 1-2 hours to figure out and fix. Many of the users who use MediaWiki on either intranets or lesser hosting sites do not have a lot in regards to knowledge/support. Getting them to upgrade every two years is hard enough, let alone every six months. Having a stable platform that can be recommended as an easy go to, can be key in whether mediawiki is chosen or a different platform is picked. Ops teams dont want to be messing with testing and deploying updates every 6 months, as it will become a time sink. A LTS option enables minor updates that only take a few minutes to deploy, and 1/4 the number of upgrades.
On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 10:34 AM, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 1:25 AM Legoktm legoktm.wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
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).
The main problem with supporting LTS in security releases is after they start to get old, backporting of those patches becomes a real chore for each release. 1.19 especially required a *lot* of wrangling on each release to get things back-portable because of the amount of code that had changed in the meantime. Most of the comments I've made re: LTSes have happened when working on a nasty backport so take them with a grain of salt.
This should not be a problem though. The release pipeline needs more cleanup and automation so we don't have to worry about backporting unless it actually causes conflicts (save the human labor for things a script can't figure out).
If I can find the cycles to fix this, 95% of my complaint with an LTS goes away. The other 5% is ideological and I can deal with it ;-)
-Chad _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l