On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 3:39 PM, Mickey Feldman <[email protected]> wrote: > One more vote for this. > > Upgrades have generally caused us much pain with little or no obvious > benefit. In our particular case, Mediawiki works well enough as is. Until > our host decides to update PHP forcing us to upgrade Mediawiki, and > discovering that it no longer works. > > While there may be things we might like improved, we can't afford to > dedicate a full time Wikimedia guru to becoming expert in the hidden corners > of the code and keeping up with every change that might have some unexpected > side effect. > > I realize that some of the changes are security fixes, and a Good Thing, but > I suspect these are in the minority. Our wiki is not public, so we could > probably get away with being a bit more lax about that, but when Mediawiki > is suddenly no longer compatible with php version-whatever, we have no > choice but to upgrade.
I've seen a couple of comments similar to this one that seem to have the causal chain reversed so I thought I would try to clarify. If and when MediaWiki updates its minimum required PHP version nothing will change for existing MediaWiki deployments. The change will only effect new MediaWiki releases. If you are happily running MediaWiki 1.23 or similar on your wiki nothing at all will change. If and when your hosting provider updates their installed PHP version nothing will change for existing MediaWiki deployments. PHP generally goes out if its way to maintain backwards compatibility with running software designed for older versions of the PHP runtime. In the few cases that there are backwards compatibility breaking changes it is very likely that MediaWiki has already been patched to deal with them unless you are running a version of MediaWiki that predates the initial release of the new PHP version your provider has upgraded to. In that case if you are running a supported LTS version of MediaWiki you should only need to upgrade to the latest point version. If you are running something older than a supported LTS release, yes you may have to upgrade. Bryan -- Bryan Davis Wikimedia Foundation <[email protected]> [[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] Sr Software Engineer Boise, ID USA irc: bd808 v:415.839.6885 x6855 _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
