On 01/14/2013 01:34 AM, Dmitriy Sintsov wrote:
My own (already past) experience of developing MediaWiki extensions shows that it is much easier to keep the compatibility layer in extension itself rather than backporting large changes into older versions of core.
This does point to another possible way to backport the changes -- some sort of compatibility extension. That allows the core to remain stable, but allows people to use some newer extensions if they need the features.
However there are major milestone versions, such as 1.17 with ResourceLoader and 1.21 with ContentHandler, and it's not easy to backport their functionality back [...]. So, the extensions probably has to be compatible to such "major milestone versions".
Agreed. 1.19 is (in retrospect) a good choice for an LTS version since ResourceLoader has stabilized somewhat.
But many of the sites the wikistats list have are quite large and thus earn enough of money to their owners. I wonder why do not they update their sites.
"Don't fix what isn't broke" is probably part of the thinking.
One guess I know that some admins consider newer versions are slower than old ones, do not know how much that is true.
Mariya Miteva [[mw:User:Mitevam]] is talking to non-WMF users of MediaWiki and has found that some people are put off by the difficulty of upgrading MediaWiki.
For example, many people have put in some effort to modify a skin for their needs only to find gratuitous changes in the core made with (what appears to be) little thought for backwards compatibility.
So, if a site is working for me as it is, and the only reasons for me to upgrade are some obscure security issues that I may never face, then I will probably find a way to work around the issues instead of upgrading.