Version lifecycle/cs

Vývoj MediaWiki je založen na "průběžné integraci změn", kdy se veškeré softwarové změny implementují za běhu na všechny weby, které spravuje Wikimedia. Takto se v pravidelných intervalech aktualizuje např. Wikipedia.

Teoreticky, se hlavní verze vydávají co půl roku a pak se, po dobu jednoho roku, pro ně vydávají bezpečnostní aktualizace. Na to, abychom natrvalo podporovali zastaralé verze a dál pro ně vydávali bezpečnostní aktualizace o opravy kritických chyb bohužel nemáme čas. Navíc, se kód rychle mění, takže by to u verzí, které již zastaraly, ani nebylo možné.

Správce verzí proto důrazně doporučuje, aby se provozovatelé wiki přihlásili k odběru zpráv z e-mailové konference, přes kterou jim budou přicházet informace o všech verzích, a usilovali o to, aby jejich wiki měla stále tu nejaktuálnější verzi softwaru. Tato oznámení se zveřejňují i na webu  a.

Verze a konec jejich životního cyklu
Versions included in the above table that are marked as obsolete as well as versions not listed at all 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 "current version" or "LTS" be used in a production environment.

Pravidla pro vydání

 * 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 neccessarily include in general.
 * 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, 1.23 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 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 1.26 came out, an announcement was made for 1.23 users letting them know what changes they could expect in 1.27.

Release schedule
This timeline is a schedule for what needs to happen before the release of a new version. The date of the actual release is given here as T (for "time" of release) and the suffix -# (for “number of weeks prior to 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 branches for each extension version corresponding a MediaWiki version. (See for details.) For extensions hosted in Wikimedia's git repos, such branches (with names such as  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 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.