End of extended support for Django 1.11

[Daniela Kim]

Hi everyone,

For end of extended support of Django 1.11, the Django Roadmap says "until at least April 2020" and Django's Supported Versions page says just "April 2020". Given the ambiguity here, may I interpret this as the extended support will last until the end of April, if not beyond?

Thanks,

Daniela

[Mariusz Felisiak]

No, support of Django 1.11 ends on 1st April.

Best,
Mariusz

[Daniela Kim]

Mariusz,

Thank you for your response.

Would it be possible for the Django Fellows to vote to extend Django 1.11's EOL by a few weeks? For those of us with a large Django codebase, we were bitten by the onerous Python 2->3 upgrade and so the start of our Django upgrade was delayed by several weeks.

Also, given the current global situation with Covid-19, including (1) work-life difficulties/transitions for organizations and our developers and (2) an evermore global online presence with further exposure to online security threats, a graceful extension would be very much appreciated.

Thank you for your consideration.

Daniela

[James Bennett]

The end of support simply means there will be no further releases, and
any showstopping bugs reported will not be fixed. It doesn't mean
Django itself will stop working. Also, the decision is in the hands of
the Technical Board, not the Django Fellows, so the correct process
would be to request that the Technical Board schedule additional
support/releases of Django 1.11.

That said, my personal opinion is that both the Python 2 EOL (2020-01)
and the Django 1.11 EOL (2020-04) were set years in advance;
organizations which waited until the last minute to do their upgrades
would simply wait until the last minute again if given an extension,
and be right back in the same problem. There has to be a cutoff date
at some point where we just say "sorry, but if you haven't prioritized
upgrading for years and years, we cannot tie up our open-source
project's resources because of that". And the announced cutoff, which
is in line with previous LTS releases of Django, seems as reasonable
as any other.

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers (Contributions to Django itself)" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-develop...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/f5718ec3-6041-40db-93fd-b7b8b354e64a%40googlegroups.com.

[Adam Johnson]

I agree with James, the cutoff date has been more than reasonable.

Also, if there aren't any show-stopping bugs you know about, asking for the extension of the EOL "by a few weeks" doesn't really mean much. If we were past the cutoff date, and a high impact, wide reaching bug was found - yes, maybe I'd be in favour of a temporary extension and a bug fix release. But there isn't any.

For smaller bug fixes, you can always backport them yourselves to your fork. You can use the script on https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/CommitterTips#AutomatingBackports and pip install the tarball from github: https://adamj.eu/tech/2019/03/11/pip-install-from-a-git-repository/ .

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/CAL13Cg_WBtBU%3D_ZrSPfgWfzP0U2PGsFXvcCMCY8GCcDRybS5tQ%40mail.gmail.com.

--

Adam

[Mariusz Felisiak]

Personally, I'm counting the days and I'm against extending support of Django 1.11, just 1 day remaining.

Best,
Mariusz

[Daniela Kim]

Thank you all. I am mostly concerned about a possible widespread security issue. Hopefully, this is only paranoia on my part. While I'll look out for Adam's "maybe" ;) in such an event, I'll also look into the links Adam shared in case we need to backport any fixes ourselves.

I appreciate the responses you have provided and thank you deeply for your ongoing dedication to this project and for the global web community at large. And yes, I completely agree that my organization needs to be more proactive on upgrades - this is a muscle we're improving day-by-day - including with this upgrade - though a few weeks late.

Best,

Daniela