Upgrade Jenkins, or not ?

[louwho]

Off and on, I have touched upon Jenkins.  My expertise is InstallShield development, with some Release engineering.  Anyway, new project, taking over the Jenkins build system also.  Current  Jenkins version is 1.609.3, the Jenkins LTS is now 2.6.03.  Putting aside (for now), the old adage of 'if it an't broken, don't fix it', are there any real advantages to upgrading to the latest version, or should I just leave it alone?   The product builds are building PowerBuilder and Java products..and then InstallShield, copies to AWS S3, etc.  We are also considering using some third party tools that will allow us to move the Powerbuilder stuff from the CVS repository to GIT.  As an aside, does anyone know if you can have two versions of PowerBuilder on the same build system?

[Mark Waite]

With that age of a system, I'd either leave it alone or replace it with a new Jenkins version.  I wouldn't attempt to upgrade it "in place".

If you decide to not leave it alone, refer to the https://jenkins.io/doc/upgrade-guide/ and realize that you're moving across a 2 year gap and a major version number change, with significant new functionality added in that two year period.

Jenkins 2 is really great, and has real, very serious advantages over 1.609.3.  Some of those advantages include:

• Blue Ocean user experience is intensely focused on developers
• Pipeline expresses job definitions in a domain specific language tuned to continuous delivery
• Multi-branch Pipeline will create and destroy jobs automatically based on discovered branches
• Java 8 is required (placing you on a currently supported JDK)
• Many security advisories have been resolved
• Performance and scale improvements
• Reliability improvements
• Significant enhancements in many plugins

Mark Waite

On Wed, Aug 23, 2017 at 2:44 PM louwho <loue...@comcast.net> wrote:

Off and on, I have touched upon Jenkins.  My expertise is InstallShield development, with some Release engineering.  Anyway, new project, taking over the Jenkins build system also.  Current  Jenkins version is 1.609.3, the Jenkins LTS is now 2.6.03.  Putting aside (for now), the old adage of 'if it an't broken, don't fix it', are there any real advantages to upgrading to the latest version, or should I just leave it alone?   The product builds are building PowerBuilder and Java products..and then InstallShield, copies to AWS S3, etc.  We are also considering using some third party tools that will allow us to move the Powerbuilder stuff from the CVS repository to GIT.  As an aside, does anyone know if you can have two versions of PowerBuilder on the same build system?

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[Ryan Campbell]

If you are still on 1.609, you are likely vulnerable to wide array of security issues.

Suggest that you use a restored backup to test the upgrade and see what the issues are, if any.

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[Terry O'Leary]

I went through a similar situation. We had an older version of Jenkins (1.534) on a standalone configuration. I took the approach of standing up a new instance of Jenkins, this time with a master/slave configuration. First I took inventory of all the plugins that were used on the old Jenkins server, and installed them on the new server, and also took not of the difference in version to anticipate what issues may arise when setting up new jobs. I then used the Job import plugin to pull in all the jobs I had on the old Jenkins server to the new server. This made is a lot easier to reconfigure the jobs slightly with the new master/slave configuration. Aside some minor issues I am working through. the transation wasn't too bad.

The advantages, also mentioned in the other posts are:

• easier to upgrade Jenkins core with auto upgrade function
• security updates
  
• performance improvements

Terry O