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  • Extending unofficial support for D6 for 4.3, maybe more?
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Author Topic: Extending unofficial support for D6 for 4.3, maybe more?  (Read 18188 times)

JoeMurray

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Extending unofficial support for D6 for 4.3, maybe more?
September 21, 2012, 08:21:13 am
There has been interest in maintaining some level of support for Drupal 6 until Drupal 8 comes out. That's the point at which Drupal stops providing official support for Drupal 6, and the security team no longer is responsible for creating patches for vulnerabilities discovered in D6 (http://drupal.org/security-advisory-policy).

As many people have noted, organizations using CiviCRM are often not able to afford a major upgrade of Drupal in a short timeframe. They often expect their investment in a new site to last them for 2-3 years often longer. Some key Drupal contrib modules weren't available in stable D7 releases until fall 2011 or even winter 2012. So the economics mean that many Drupal 6 / CiviCRM sites can't do a major rebuild into Drupal 7 just yet.

Dries suggests on his blog a target Drupal 8 release date of September 2013 (http://buytaert.net/updated-drupal-8-release-schedule). Current best odds on when that will actually occur (it's ready when it's ready ;)) is mid-November 2013 (http://drupal.webstocks.ws/lottery/drupal-8-release-date).

We have seen a few MIH initiatives to extend the availability of Drupal 6 releases for CiviCRM and/or continued official support (first one: http://civicrm.org/blogs/sschmoller/civicrm-needs-work-securely-drupal-6-couple-years-not-few-months and http://civicrm.org/blogs/stoob/drupal-6-extended-support-make-it-happen-almost-there-please-help). While not officially supported in 4.2, the core team is rolling a D6 tarball for 4.2 point releases and putting them on Sourceforge.

Lobo had estimated that extending official support for Drupal 6 would cost about $750 / month. What is the current level of 'unofficial' support for D6 in 4.2, and what would be required to extend this until Drupal 6 is deprecated? Is another MIH required? If so, how much would be required per month?
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Re: Extending unofficial support for D6 for 4.3, maybe more?
September 21, 2012, 08:31:38 am
Thanks for bringing up this issue Joe.

I've expressed concern about this issue also and would enjoy seeing some numbers for continued Drupal 6 support.  Those are the first numbers I've heard bounced around for the cost of support, and at first glace they seem reasonable, but of course are up for discussion.   Eileen is the primary support person for D6 issues and does take them seriously for the 4.2 release currently.

I see that D6 support may seem burdensome on our already overworked team, but I also know that many organizations have no plans to update to Drupal 7 soon.  It's not only for budgetary reasons but also because Drupal 7 simply doesn't have the contributed modules yet (or ever) to do what their existing site already does.

IMHO, programmers tend to greatly over-estimate the average non-profit's willingness and speed when make technical changes.

Can we get feedback from the core team about the cost of ongoing support for D6?


« Last Edit: September 21, 2012, 08:33:25 am by Stoob »
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JoeMurray

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Re: Extending unofficial support for D6 for 4.3, maybe more?
September 21, 2012, 12:13:02 pm
On irc, dlobo when pressed on the cost of continuing D6 support just said "for 4.3 we dont know and wont know till we are done making all the changes for symfony integration et al."
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jcm55

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Re: Extending unofficial support for D6 for 4.3, maybe more?
September 21, 2012, 04:59:12 pm
Great interest here in extended D6 support.  We are still on D6 / Civi 4.1 for a number of reasons:

1) Our current deployment passes the quarterly PCI-DSS scan.  I fear that an upgrade will introduce "issues" that cause the scan to fail, and much work will be required to regain passing status.
2) Multiple complex views built in D6 / views2 with CiviCRM integration that I am not super-keen on rebuilding
3) civievent-discount module still not stable for 4.2 AFAIK
 

mclyde

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Re: Extending unofficial support for D6 for 4.3, maybe more?
November 15, 2012, 06:44:14 am
I would like to see support for D6/civi 4.2, 4.3 as well as the discount module!

Given our dependence on other Drupal modules, I don;t see us upgrading to D7 anytime soon.

m
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Re: Extending unofficial support for D6 for 4.3, maybe more?
November 15, 2012, 08:30:51 am

Seems like 4.2 is working well with D6

The discount stuff has migrated to an extension and there is now an MIH for this;

http://civicrm.org/content/make-it-happen#discount

which is fairly close to reaching its goal. So we'll have a solid discount extentsion for 4.2

I think another approach that a few folks might want to consider is making one version a long term stable version and backporting patches from the later versions as they deem fit. Seems like 4.2 might be an ideal candidate for this

lobo
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  • CiviCRM Community Forums (archive) »
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  • General Discussion (please no support requests here!) (Moderator: Michał Mach) »
  • Extending unofficial support for D6 for 4.3, maybe more?

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