[consulting] Staying Current

[Karen Stevenson]

The point is that the most prolific maintainers and developers will be
focused on the newer code and can't realistically support three completely
different versions at one time, so they will stop paying attention to the
oldest one. It's very very hard to support two versions at once, let alone
three, and it's not just core, but all the contrib modules -- who will
support three versions of all of them?

Sure, anyone who wants to can step up and provide support for the older
version, but it will be a *few* people providing support, and probably not
for all modules, and as things break or develop security problems, more and
more of them will stop getting fixed. So it will become more and more of a
problem to be stuck on the older code.

This is the way all software works. Software developed by organizations that
pay their maintainers can keep support more older versions than software
that is dependent on community support, but all of them have to cut off
support for older versions at some point.

If you don't have a system to stay up to date with the current code, what
happens if some really ugly security hole develops or something critical
breaks and there is no one available who can or knows how to fix it? If your
web site is at all important to your business (and when would it not be?)
you can't take that kind of chance with it. Whatever the cost of upgrading
is, it's less than the cost of losing your web site.

Karen

On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 6:43 AM, Fred Jones <fredthejonester at gmail.com>wrote:

> >> When D7 gets released, the community will support D7 and D6.
> >>
> >> D5 support will be dropped at that juncture.
> >
> > Who gets to say what "the community" will do?
> >
> > Because Drupal has expanded a lot over recent years and has been adopted
> by
> > some big sites - surely there is a stronger argument than in the past for
> > longer term support.
> >
> > So maybe the existing security team won't take it on - but if there are
> > enough people in the community who do want to support D5 for longer then
> I
> > can't see why anyone else in the community would want to prevent this.
>
> I have wondered the same thing. How many more D5 sites are there than
> D4? A factor of 10, 100 or 1000? Very hard to say I think but there
> are a few facts about core downloads at least here
> http://buytaert.net/drupal-download-statistics-2008
>
> Whatever that figure is, there certainly tens if not hundreds of
> thousands of D5 sites out there, and as mentioned, many of them are
> large sites owned by large entities. My guess is that a very large
> percentage, if not the majority, do not have a strong interest in
> upgrading. That's just my guess.
>
> Fred
> _______________________________________________
> consulting mailing list
> consulting at drupal.org
> http://lists.drupal.org/mailman/listinfo/consulting
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/consulting/attachments/20090329/e7fb53bb/attachment.htm>