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

[Mauro Carvalho Chehab]

Hi Stephen,

Em Thu, 5 Nov 2015 18:18:36 +0000
"Finucane, Stephen" <stephen.finucane at intel.com> escreveu:

> 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? 

Typically, LTS distributions don't upgrade packages that contain API
changes, as the hole point of LTS is the warranty that the APIs should
be stable.

For example, Debian 7 comes with Django 1.4, and will keep using this
version until May, 2018 (when Debian 7 ceases to be supported):
	https://packages.debian.org/source/wheezy/python-django

That's by the way, the version we use at patchwork.linuxtv.org. So, we're
unable to do any patchwork update since the day the django 1.4
support was dropped from patchwork.

We have a plan to move to Debian 8, with comes with python 2 + Django 1.7:
	https://packages.debian.org/source/jessie/python-django

> 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?

It doesn't matter whatever version Django maintainers decide to be their
LTS version if they don't sync it with the LTS distro releases.

The point is: it is a very high risk to run patchwork on any serious
projects like the Linux Kernel on some server that doesn't run a LTS
distribution.

It is also a serious risk to manually maintain its own manually
maintained packages on an LTS distro, as you may risk forgetting to do
some important security upgrade because the fix is not packaged by
inside the distribution.

Regards,
Mauro