Confusion about "stable"/"recommended"/"lts"

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#1

Hi,

I hope someone can clear up my confusion about the three different Xwiki branches

  • stable
  • recommended
  • lts

Our Xwiki instance is currently running on version 15.10.2 (repo: http://maven.xwiki.org stable/), because I thought that “stable” in this case meant “for production”. But as defined on the official Xwiki versioning page, it is merely “This is the version recommended if you wish to try out the new features from the current Cycle (see below for an explanation of what a Cycle is). It’s possible to use those in production.”

The last time I had contact with the Xwiki support (end of 2023), they told me we should switch over to the LTS branch at the beginning of 2024, because LTS is the one they recommend for production use.

I was surprised to learn that stable is not LTS in Xwiki and we decided to switch to the LTS branch (http://maven.xwiki.org recommended/ as described by the Xwiki support).

But now, browsing the repo on https://maven.xwiki.org/, I saw there’s a difference between lts and recommended there, because lts is on version 15.10.4, but recommended is on 15.5.4.

If I want a stable and production-ready repository, should I choose recommended or LTS now? I’m leaning towards LTS, because of your versioning scheme we’re already on 15.10.1, but if there’s a better way, I’m open to input.

Thanks in advance!

#2

Hello, there’s no concept of “recommended”, only “stable” and “LTS”. See https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Support#HSupportedVersions

Note: This forum is for the open source project. I think when you say “xwiki support” you probably means a company offering professional services on top of the XWiki software, like XWiki SAS.

I know that XWiki SAS has a concept of recommended (which is basically an LTS that happens mid-year) but this is not the case for xwiki.org, we only have Stable and LTS (once per year). They also support older versions for their clients.

#3

I’m curious to know where you saw that concept of “recommended” :slight_smile: Thx

#4

oh just noticed it now too! Index of /recommended weird… this looks like a mistake. I’ll check who did this but in any case this is not official and we only have LTS and Stable.

1 Like
#5

Thank you, that was indeed a problem I could not understand.

I will choose the LTS branch then for our instances, thank you very much for clearing things up.

#6

BTW there’s an ongoing forum thread (not closed), at Switching to a LTS release every 6 months? that is related to the topic.

We’re going to add a README file inside Index of /recommended. It’s basically a special directory supported by some committers who work for XWiki SAS, as a private branch. It’s not officially supported by the open source project.

#7

Done, see https://maven.xwiki.org/recommended/README

2 Likes
#8

perfect, thank you very much!