2009/10/10 Ziggy <zigg...@gmail.com>: > Just because something has been updated it does not mean that you have > to use the latest version.. There could be a million reasons why > someone decides to stick with an older version of an application. > Upgrading just for the sake of it does not make sense business sense > at all and it costs a lot of money too. If it aint broke don't fix it!
I'm somewhere in the middle of this discussion. Reasons to keep using an old software version: at least: - We've got it configured and working; - We are aware of any security issues, watch for advisories, and evaluate the risks; - The risk of downtime due to failures from an upgrade is unacceptable; - We can still get support for the old version; - We can't afford the time to learn to configure and maintain the new version; - The licensing costs for the new version are prohibitive (not a problem with Tomcat, luckily); - The performance of the old version is acceptable, or we can add hardware to get round any capacity issues; - There are legislative or environmental dependencies on the old version (for example, we're running this on embedded hardware to provide the web interface to a broadband router, and we would have to port a more recent JVM to the hardware to use a newer Tomcat); - There are no showstopping issues in the old version for us. Reasons to move to a more recent software version: at least: - There are security issues in the old version that are unacceptable to us, and they are fixed in the new version; - We cannot get support for the old version, and we have an issue that we cannot solve ourselves, and we can get support for the new version; - The performance of the old version is unacceptable, and we cannot add hardware to get round the problem, and the new version has better performance; - There are legislative or environmental dependencies on the new version; - There is one or more showstopping issue that makes the old version unusable for what we now want to do with it. Andre is probably correct in that the support for the old version on this list will be poor. Whether that's a good enough reason to upgrade depends on Vijay's requirements :-). Like you, I don't upgrade hardware or software "just for the sake of it", but do upgrade for security reasons, or for support or functionality reasons where the business case is justified. For example this means that we have some 10-year-old software, though it's not running on its original hardware. - Peter --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tomcat.apache.org
