[PATCH v2 0/4] Remove support for Django 1.6

[Finucane, Stephen]

> On Thu, 2015-11-05 at 16:00 +0000, Stephen Finucane wrote:
> > Django 1.6 is no longer supported, neither with feature bugfixes nor
> > security fixes. Additionally, Django 1.6 does not support the use of
> > Django Migrations, necessitating the continued use of manual SQL
> > migration files. Drop support for Django 1.6 thus encouraging users
> > to move to Django 1.7 or, ideally, Long Term Support (LTS) release
> > 1.8.
> >
> 
> RHEL (or really EPEL7) has Django 1.6.11 [1]
> 
> This is what's going to be installed on kernel.org, so this would be
> really sad for us using their instance, since we couldn't ask them to
> update patchwork beyond this change.
> 
> Any chance you could reconsider?
> 
> johannes
> 
> [1] http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=680316

Hi Johannes,

Thanks for reaching out. I was afraid this would happen...

The problem with continuing support for Django 1.6 is, as mentioned, that it incurs a huge amount of overhead due to the SQL migrations (this affects not only developers but also sysadmins, who must validate and apply these migrations). There's also the security impacts of using unsupported Django versions, though admittedly the extended support should mitigate these impact for another few months.

We want patchwork to be as usable as possible and 'kernel.org' is clearly a hugely popular instance. I can revert these patches and continue to add migrations for the foreseeable future, but before doing so I'd like to know if there is any way around this issue? Django 1.8 is LTS so I imagine there should be support coming for this in EPEL, SLES etc. I'm little to no experience with these distros though, and I have no idea how these folks plan/publish their roadmaps. Could you advise?

Stephen