Canasta's plan for supporting both MediaWiki 1.39 and 1.35 simultaneously

[Jeffrey Wang]

Hi all,

The release of any major LTS version of MediaWiki is a Pandora's box for us developers and sysadmins. This is especially the case for Canasta, which needs to support all common use cases of MediaWiki.

Due to several prominent extensions currently not having support for MediaWiki 1.39, most notably Semantic MediaWiki (as of November 4, 2022), we've come up with a plan to continue offering support for all use cases.

It will be necessary for wikis using Semantic MediaWiki to continue using MediaWiki 1.35 for the near future, so we'll be branching off the current 1.2.x release effective today. We'll be maintaining 1.2.x in order to continue providing support for MediaWiki 1.35 and continue providing it security updates for all new minor versions of 1.35. Future Canasta releases for 1.3.x and beyond will be for supporting MediaWiki 1.39. (Each Canasta version supports one and only one MediaWiki version at a time.)

Regarding MediaWiki 1.39 support: We are making decent progress on adding support for it so far. Core MediaWiki 1.39 support is currently in beta, and we've compiled a list of Git commits for each Canasta bundled extension to begin implementing/testing.

For more info on Canasta's versioning policy and how we're offering concurrent support for MediaWiki 1.39 and 1.35, please see https://github.com/CanastaWiki/Canasta-Documentation/blob/main/versions.md

Thanks,

Jeffrey