Version lifecycle
MediaWiki operates on a "continuous integration" development model, where software changes are pushed live to Wikimedia websites such as Wikipedia regularly.
In theory, new major releases are issued every half-year, and release branches continue to receive security updates for up to a year after the first release. However, due to time constraints and rapid refactoring of the code base, we cannot support obsolete releases forever, and security and critical updates are not applied to releases that have reached their end-of-life status.
The release manager strongly recommends that wiki operators subscribe to the mediawiki-announce mailing list, which receives notification of all releases, and ensure that their wiki runs the most up to date version of the software possible. These announcements are also posted to mediawiki-l and wikitech-l.
Versions and their end-of-life
| Version | Status | Release | End-of-life |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.44.x | future version | ||
| 1.43.x (LTS) | future long-term support version | ||
| 1.42.x | current stable version | ||
| 1.41.x | legacy version | ||
| 1.40.x | obsolete version | ||
| 1.39.x (LTS) | current long-term support version | ||
| 1.38.x | obsolete version |
Versions in the above table marked as obsolete and versions not listed at all will not receive any security fixes. This also includes all versions older than the oldest version listed. They may contain critical security vulnerabilities and other major bugs, including the threat of possible data loss and/or corruption. The release manager has also issued a strong recommendation that only versions listed above as the current “stable version”, "legacy version" or “long-term support version” be used in a production environment.
- Alpha development
- Release development
- Stable release
- Long-term support release
Release policy
- Every point release will include updated i18n files as well as any bug fixes. No new features will be back-ported to point releases, and support does not necessarily include bundled extensions and skins in general.
- A major release will be made every six months.
- A minor release (including security patches, message translation back-ports, and general bugfixes) will be made every quarter.
- A long-term support release (LTS) will be made every two years. There will be a one-year overlap in LTS support. For example, 1.23 was supported until May 2017. 1.27 was released the year before so that people have it available as an LTS to move to and a year to make the transition.
- Release notes will continue to be the basis for seeing what has changed. Because of the nature of a volunteer-driven project, it isn't possible to say with certainty what will happen in the next 6-12 months.
Release schedule
This timeline is a schedule for what needs to happen before a new version is released. The date of the actual release is given here as T (for "time" of release) and the suffix -# (for “number of weeks before release”).
| Relative schedule | Task |
|---|---|
| T - 7 | Announce that the release branch will be created in one week. Ask people to ensure that anything needed to complete in-progress features is merged before then. Create "MW-X.XX-release" in Phabricator. |
| T - 6 | Create the branch for core and all extensions in Gerrit. |
| T - 5 | Apply the X.XX-rc.0 tag and release the initial release candidate. |
| T - 4 | Collect any bug reports and summarise them on the mailing list. |
| T - 3 | Apply the X.XX-rc.1 tag and release the second release candidate. Any new extensions proposed for addition to the tarball should be included by this point. No extension changes are made after this point. |
| T - 2 | Collect any new bug reports, merge fixes, back out new, incomplete features accidentally included, apply X.XX-rc.2 tag and release third release candidate. |
| T - 1 | Repeat previous step, use X.XX-rc.final to tag and release. No backports are accepted after this point. |
| T | TAG the repository with X.XX and make the release. |
Extension lifecycle management
Most MediaWiki installations include a significant number of extensions (Wikimedia wikis often have around 140). Managing the maintenance bug fixing of extensions and choosing the right version of an extension in cases where the HEAD development version relies on features not yet available in stable or oldstable MediaWiki core can be challenging.
Extension maintainers are therefore strongly encouraged to maintain a git branch for each extension version corresponding to a MediaWiki version.
(See Compatibility#MediaWiki extensions for details.)
For extensions hosted in Wikimedia's git repos, such branches (with names such as REL1_30 for MediaWiki 1.30) are created automatically from master when a new MediaWiki version is branched (on the assumption that the extension master is compatible with MediaWiki master at all times).
However, it's preferable for the extension maintainer to fix bugs not only in HEAD but also in the oldstable and stable versions (by backporting the fix to the old branches if necessary).
The goal of these rules is that people or organisations installing MediaWiki can rely on installing the newest release of a version and matching extensions by a simple method, e.g., for 1.20.x core by referring to REL1_20 in git.
It avoids tarballs and zip files with non-relevant and unpredictable names.
See also
- Compatibility information for MediaWiki, most importantly PHP and MySQL
- Stable interface policy
- Generators on WikiApiary - Statistics about the use of different versions of MediaWiki.