On Thursday, December 3, 2015, Chad <innocentkiller(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 1:25 AM Legoktm
<legoktm.wikipedia(a)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.