Hello Tim,
I'd like to contribute a somewhat different (although I suppose
common) perspective to this discussion. I help run a free-for-the-community
shared webhosting service, and one of the services we have is "automatic
installation" of common web applications for people who don't know
very much about setting up or deploying applications. Wordpress and
MediaWiki are among our most popular installations.
Since it's not reasonable to assume someone who can click a button to
setup an application has the know-how to upgrade it manually, any
installation that we autoinstall also comes with an upgrade promise:
when new versions of the application come out, we reserve the right to
automatically upgrade the application for you. (Since we allow users
to patch their installs, there are some, ah, technical difficulties associated
with this.)
We've noticed several things:
- When Wordpress 3.0 came out, we received several support tickets
asking us when we would be pushing an upgrade, and asked us if
anything bad would happen if they went ahead and upgraded their
install themselves. We have /never/ had this happen for MediaWiki.
- Our spread of versions is quite interesting:
wordpress 649 installs
2.0.2 * 5 +
2.0.4 7 +
2.0.11 4 +
2.1.3 1 +
2.3 2 +
2.3.2 * 1 +
2.3.3 * 29 ++
2.5.1 * 17 ++
2.6 1 +
2.6.2 2 +
2.6.3 2 +
2.7 2 +
2.7.1 * 15 +
2.8 * 8 +
2.8.1 1 +
2.8.2 * 2 +
2.8.4 | 6 +
2.8.5 | 3 +
2.9 | 2 +
2.9.1 | 4 +
2.9.2 | 74 +++++
3.0 | 461 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
mediawiki 1017 installs
1.5.8 * 118 ++++++
1.11.0 * 125 ++++++
1.14.0 * 6 +
1.15.0 * 6 +
1.15.1 | 65 +++
1.15.2 | 15 +
1.15.3 | 18 +
1.15.4 | 664 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Applications that are on older versions we attempted to upgrade, but had
to bail out because there were nontrivial merge conflicts (that is, the
user
had edited some core files and the upgrade would have obliterated those
changes)--there are some exceptions but that is the primary mode by which
upgrades failed.
The Star means that we offered installation of that version. Our upgrade
process was spotty until about a year and a half ago, when we started
really
making sure we tracked upstream versions closely.
There are certainly some conclusions to be made here, including "When people
patch MediaWiki, they patch it in a way that's really hard to upgrade" and
"People don't upgrade MediaWiki by themselves" (note that Wordpress has a spread
of versions all over the place, whereas every MediaWiki was from a version we
supported."
Let me know if you have any questions; I'd be happy to run other queries
on our setup.
Cheers,
Edward
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