Version lifecycle/fr

MediaWiki utilise le modèle de développement dit d’« intégration continue », dans lequel les modification du logiciel sont déployées régulièrement sur les sites Wikimedia tels que Wikipédia.

En théorie, de nouvelles versions majeures sont publiées tous les six mois et les branches de ces versions reçoivent des mises à jour de sécurité jusqu’à un an après la première publication. À cause des contraintes de temps et la restructuration rapide du code de base, nous ne pouvons pas maintenir indéfiniment ; les mises à jour de sécurité et les mises à jour critiques ne sont donc pas disponibles pour les versions ayant atteint le statut de fin de vie.

Le responsable de la publication recommande fortement aux administrateurs de wikis de s’inscrire à la liste de diffusion, qui reçoit des annonces pour toutes les publications, et de s’assurer que leur wiki fonctionne avec la version la plus à jour possible du logiciel. Ces annonces sont aussi envoyées aux listes  et.

Versions et dates de fin de vie
Versions included in this table that are marked as obsolete will not receive any security fixes. 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 current version or legacy version should be used in a production environment.

Release policy

 * A major release will be made every six months.


 * A long term support release (LTS) will be made every two years. There will be a one-year overlap in LTS support.  For example, 1.19 is supported until May 2015. 1.23 will be released the year before that so that people will have 1.23 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 any certainty what will happen in the next 6-12 months.


 * To mitigate the problem of release notes, we will publish a list of new features in the upcoming LTS relative to the last LTS six months before it comes out. This means that about the time when 1.22 comes out, we'll have an announcement for 1.19 users letting them know what changes they can expect in 1.23.


 * Point releases will be made at least monthly, on the last Thursday of the month. 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 doesn't include extensions in general, see below (e.g. Extension:UniversalLanguageSelector doesn't support current LTS).

Extension lifecycle management
Most MediaWiki installation include a significant number of extensions (WMF MediaWikis often around 80 extensions). 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, is a major challenge for all maintainers of MediaWiki installations.

Extension maintainers are therefore strongly encouraged to maintain a git tag or branch for their version corresponding to the release tag the stable and oldstable version. An initial version, that simply points to the state of the code at the time of the release may be created centrally. However, it is the responsibility of the extension maintainer to fix bugs not only in HEAD but also in the oldstable and stable versions. If the extension works with all of oldstable, stable and HEAD, this requires only to update the tags. However, if some changes are specific to later versions, the lifecycle rule require that branches are created and individual merges of the bugfix to each branch be made.

The goal of these rules is that people or organizations 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.