Upgrading Opal to newer django versions?

[Jake Carter]

Hey Team,

Really impressed with the work that you have done on Opal. There are a lot of open source projects that have great functionality, but lack a great UX.

You have accomplished both with Opal, well done.

Quick question regarding upgrading Django versions.

I am assuming there are reasons that you have not upgraded to newer versions of Django?

What were they?

Are there large changes that would need to be undertaken, that would make the upgrades not worthwhile vs starting from scratch in newer versions?

Was the decision related to time /efforts based on being busy and have other things to do?

I have a few projects that I am going to use the existing Opal as a prototype.

I have had a very quick look at upgrading and at a high level it looks pretty tame as an upgrade, but I very well could be missing some critical knowledge.

It is a well thought tool, and seems a shame to let it get to far behind the Django versions if it is possible to upgrade without rebuilding everything.

I would appreciate any thoughts and insights that you may have.

Thanks in advance,

Jake

[David Miller]

Morning Jake, 

Thanks for the kind words!

We try to keep as up to date as possible with recent Django verisions, but have found over the years that we often need to provide longer upstream support windows. 

e.g. the main reason for sticking at Django 2.0.x the last time we upgraded was that we needed to support PostgreSQL 9.3.

However I believe that as of a couple months ago, this is no longer the case and we could in fact drop that and upgrade with the next release.

Nobody has gotten around to it in the last couple months.

Past Django version upgrades have never required a full rewrite, it's more close reading the release notes, paying particular attention to backwards incompatible changes, refactors etc, making sure the tests still run.

Where backwards incompatible changes occur (most minor version Django releases), we tend to upgrade multiple applications as well as the framework before merging the upgrade PR so we can run through end user application tests as well as unittests.

Broadly, PRs welcome though !

Best

David

[Jake Carter]

Thanks for the quick response, we are in progress with upgrading to Django 2.1,and then are planning on proceeding to 2.2.

Where are you wanting the Django version to be on? 2.2 or up to 3.x?

We will be happy to provide the updated codebase to you and the team to make sure it is of use to the community.

Should we follow the normal PR process, or would you prefer this to go to a separate branch that you would prefer us to push to?

Thanks,

Jake

[Fred Kingham]

Hi Jake, 

That all sounds excellent. 

We find that when making package updates, it's best to do step wise per feature releases,( ie at a PR per x.x leve)l. 

We can then test each release against a lot of opal applications for bug checking. That way if we only get up to e.g. 2.2 then we've still got a viable great improvement.

So we would be looking for a PR with the changes at each feature release with changelog.md/upgrading.md updated accordingly. Does that sound ok?

Thanks,

 Fred

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Fred Kingham

Open Health Care

openhealthcare.org.uk

[Jake Carter]

Hi Fred,

Sorry for the tardiness of my response.

Yes that sounds just fine.

We are still working away on it, but hope to have something soon to share withev eryone.

Thanks,

Jake

[Fred Kingham]

Hi Jake/all, I hope this does not undercut you too much. In fact I hope it helps. I did the first 2 point version bumps of opal.

https://github.com/openhealthcare/opal/pull/1921

Let me know if you think I missed anything.

I'm slightly aware that the 3.* bump means dropping python 3.5 support which may affect some folks.

Thanks,

 Fred

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