Hi Yaron, as I see it LTS for MW is mainly about applying bug fixes. The main purpose of LTS for SMW would be to provide a working set of extensions for a given configuration of MW and SMW. So LTS for SMW would indeed mainly be about support for a given MW version. But it would also apply to SMW, if for example somebody wanted to stick with the SMWSQL2 store for now (because they had an extension accessing the DB directly).
Challenge for you: Please point me to the last Semantic Bundle supporting MW 1.16. And when you have that, please provide me with a package that contains all the latest releases of extensions still working with MW 1.16. I agree with you that extension developers should keep support for older versions of MW and SMW. But they don't always do, you never know. And even if most of them do, you would still have to check extension by extension if it still supports your particular setup. And if it does not, good luck in digging through the history of the wiki page and trying to find the last version that did. And then extracting it from git. Or finding the download package. What I would like to have is bundles that for a few (two or three) given configurations of MW and SMW provide the latest available version of SB extensions. With this it would then be possible to switch to the tag or branch for that bundle on git and just pull to have the latest releases that still work with your setup. Cheers, Stephan On 25 February 2013 16:23, Yaron Koren <ya...@wikiworks.com> wrote: > Hi Stephan, > > There are a number of points to discuss here. In our case, I think long-term > support really refers to two things: support for older versions of > MediaWiki, and support for older versions of SMW. I don't know if everyone's > aware of it, but the WMF people have actually declared MediaWiki 1.19 to be > the official LTS version for the next two years - so people are supposed to > be able to use 1.19 for the next two years without any worries. See here: > > http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-November/064277.html > > In the case of the Semantic Bundle, only compatibility with MediaWiki > matters, since SMW is included in the bundle. But then again, maybe everyone > is just talking about support for MediaWiki? > > Anyway, the best approach for long-term support, in my opinion, is to have > each extension individually maintain support for older versions of MediaWiki > - especially version 1.19. (And for older versions of SMW, especially if > some version of it is declared the LTS version.) That way there doesn't need > to be special coordination done for the Semantic Bundle, and of course it > means that the benefits still apply to people who download the extensions in > other ways. > > I try to maintain support for older versions of MediaWiki in all my > extensions, going back two or more years if possible. Currently most of my > extensions support MediaWiki 1.17, which came out in June 2011 - and the > jump to 1.17 was only because of the major change in that version with the > ResourceLoader. It's not that hard to maintain backward compatibility, and I > think it's the right option, when possible - certainly easier than holding > different branches and trying to maintain all of them. > > I'm not unique in this - the Semantic Forms Inputs and Semantic Maps > extensions, other SB extensions maintained by other people (both on this > thread), also still support MediaWiki 1.17, for instance. And so does SMW > itself, for that matter - though the SMW page says that MediaWiki 1.19 is > "recommended", whatever that means. > > So could it be that the solution to this is to simply highly recommend to > all extension developers to keep support for older versions of MediaWiki, > now and in the future? > > -Yaron ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_feb _______________________________________________ Semediawiki-devel mailing list Semediawiki-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/semediawiki-devel
