[ckan-dev] [ckan-global-user-group] RFC: Releases support policy

[David Read]

18 months is still 5 or 6 versions of CKAN to support. How about the
tech team only officially supports the latest 2 releases? I would have
thought that covers most small sites, for which relatively small
amounts of customization is done and it's relatively simple to
upgrade.

For larger sites that have lots of custom features it is much harder
to upgrade and only attempt this every year or two. e.g. the likes of
data.gov.uk, data.gov.ca, data.gov, HDX, Natural History Museum, IATI.
Since these are likely to have budgets of order $100k+ could they pay
a few thousand a year to the CKAN Association for the privilege of
having guaranteed continued patch releases for the versions they are
using?

David

On 15 January 2016 at 11:38, Adrià Mercader <adria.mercader at okfn.org> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> One thing it is frequently mentioned as needing more clarity is the
> predictability of upcoming releases and how long these are supported
> for. Regarding the former, we have now settled to a roughly 3 month
> cycle of smaller releases that hopefully we can keep in the future.
>
> We now want to address the second aspect, to give developers and
> maintainers a clear idea of when they should plan their upgrades,
> avoiding having to support old versions and encourage upgrading to
> more modern and stable versions.
>
> Taking into account the resources available to the tech team, the
> release cycle and the policies similar software projects have in
> place, the tech team considers that supporting a release for 18 months
> is a reasonable policy.
>
> Here's a summary of the 2.x line release dates up until now, and what
> the end of support date would be for each of them:
>
> Version, Release Date, End of support date
> CKAN 2.5, December 2015, June 2017
> CKAN 2.4, July 2015, January 2017
> CKAN 2.3, March 2015, September 2016
> CKAN 2.2, February 2014, No longer supported
> CKAN 2.1, August 2013, No longer supported
> CKAN 2.0, May 2013, No longer supported
>
> (You can see it nicely rendered here:
> https://gist.github.com/amercader/e2d5bb06721da46c7a26)
>
> We believe this is a fair and reasonable policy, but we also
> understand that there are instances that might be stuck (hopefully
> temporarily) in older versions. The main recommendation is to upgrade
> (once your CKAN extensions target a modern version is much easier to
> upgrade them). There may be other options for supporting older
> versions like community supported forks, we can discuss them if there
> is interest in
>  this.
>
> Please let us know your views or comments on this before we make it official.
>
> Best,
>
> Adrià
>
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