One of the key reasons I use and recommend LTS is that upgrading version to version can sometimes be a nightmare. Off hand I can think of the composer and skin repo changes that each took 1-2 hours to figure out and fix. Many of the users who use MediaWiki on either intranets or lesser hosting sites do not have a lot in regards to knowledge/support. Getting them to upgrade every two years is hard enough, let alone every six months. Having a stable platform that can be recommended as an easy go to, can be key in whether mediawiki is chosen or a different platform is picked. Ops teams dont want to be messing with testing and deploying updates every 6 months, as it will become a time sink. A LTS option enables minor updates that only take a few minutes to deploy, and 1/4 the number of upgrades.
On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 10:34 AM, Chad <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 1:25 AM Legoktm <[email protected]> > 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. > > This should not be a problem though. The release pipeline needs more > cleanup and automation so we don't have to worry about backporting > unless it actually causes conflicts (save the human labor for things a > script can't figure out). > > If I can find the cycles to fix this, 95% of my complaint with an LTS goes > away. The other 5% is ideological and I can deal with it ;-) > > -Chad > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
