On Thursday, December 3, 2015, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 1:25 AM Legoktm <legoktm.wikipedia@gmail.com javascript:;> 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.
When I was doing backports to 1.19, one of the most labor intensive parts was having to ensure the patch was php 5.2 compatible, when the security patches included 5.3 syntax in the other branches. So if we do LTS's, I would vote that we try to keep the php version the same for the LTS and following 3 non-LTS releases, if possible.
I personally like the idea of LTS. The last non-work wiki I setup I initially installed with 1.23, in the hopes that it would be stable with no new features. It was for collaboration on a specific project, and the users were not wikipedians-- they didn't want new features, just wanted it to work, and to be able to add stuff there once they had figured out how to use it. In then end, they also wanted VE, so I had to install a -wmf branch that mostly worked with the current parsoid, and I pretty much didn't touch it after I got it working except to apply any security patches that addressed an actual risk.