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By mlhess on
Updated February 2016: Vendors and details on the support have been announced: Drupal 6 Long Term Support (D6 LTS) vendors announcement
On February 13, 2008, Drupal 6 was released. The policy of the community is to support only the current and previous stable versions. (When Drupal 6 was released, Drupal 4.7.x was marked unsupported. When Drupal 7 came out, Drupal 5.x was marked unsupported.) This policy was created to prevent core and module maintainers from having to maintain more than 2 active major versions of Drupal.
With the coming Drupal 8 release, this policy has been questioned. We want to ensure that sites that wish to move from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 have a supported window within which to do so. The Drupal core team, key module maintainers, and representatives of the Drupal security team met at Drupalcon Austin to discuss this as an in-person follow up to the previous discussion at https://drupal.org/node/2136029.
Drupal 6 core and modules will transition to unsupported status three months after Drupal 8 is released. "Unsupported status" means the community will not be providing support or patches in the same way we do now. Continuing to support Drupal 6 would be difficult for many reasons, including a lack of automated test coverage, the requirement for rigorous manual release testing, the slow-down it introduces in the release of security fixes for the vast majority of Drupal users (on version 7+), and the general shift of volunteers in the community moving their attention onto Drupal 8 development.
This gives Drupal 6 users a few options:
1) Upgrade to Drupal 7 any time between now and 3 months after Drupal 8.0.0 is released. Drupal 7 releases undergo almost 40,000 automated tests, and Drupal 7 will be fully supported at least until Drupal 9 comes out. Given the past history, the release of Drupal 9 is likely to be around 2018.
2) Upgrade to Drupal 8 after it is released, but before Drupal 6 is not supported anymore. Fortunately, Migrate support for Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 is already in core, and there is Migrate UI, a contributed module. While not all contributed modules will be ready at the time Drupal 8 is released, Drupal 8's migration path handles most of the critical site data via its CCK to Entities/Fields in Core migrations.
3) Find an organization that will provide extended support for Drupal 6. The Drupal Security Team will provide a method for companies and/or individuals to work together in the private security issue queue to continue developing updates, and will provide a reasonable amount of time for companies to provide patches to Drupal 6 security issues that also affect Drupal 7 or Drupal 8. The security team will coordinate access to issues for companies wishing to provide extended support for Drupal 6. However, the team will not explicitly review or test the patches (some team members may do this on their own). All code created by these vendors, would be released to the community.
Organizations and individuals interested in providing this level of support for their customers
AND who have the technical knowledge to maintain a Drupal core release should go to the security team Drupal 6 long term support page.
Both the Security Team and Drupal core leadership feel that a 3-month window after Drupal 8's release before eclipsing community support for Drupal 6 is a workable compromise between leaving Drupal 6 sites on an unsupported version the second Drupal 8 comes out, and acknowledging that our community's volunteer resources are limited and have shifted focus. We hope that organizations that rely on Drupal 6 will step up to help maintain it after community support winds down, and/or help their clients update to D8.
Comments
Typo on the first line:
Typo on the first line:
The policy of the community is to
dropsupport only the current and previous stable versions.I'm all for it, but as D6 has already been playing second fiddle to D7 for a very long time, people with D6 sites need to realize—if you don't have plans to upgrade to D7 or D8 soon, make them now!
__________________
Personal site: www.jeffgeerling.com
Thanks, Fixed
Thanks,
Fixed
Migrate issue link error
The correct link to the Migrate issue should be:
https://drupal.org/node/2121299
.
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( Evaluating the long-term route for Drupal 7.x via BackdropCMS at https://www.CMX.zone )
Thanks, fixed.
Thanks,
fixed.
Why the Change
At DrupalCon/Austin, the discussion was that the support would be for 12 months. What changed?
As this post points out, the
As this post points out, the official stance was to discontinue Drupal 6 the very second that Drupal 8.0.0 was released.
There was a proposal to extend the life of Drupal 6 for some time and 12 months had been suggested as a reasonable time frame.
In discussions before and after Drupalcon (including in issues where extending the life of Drupal 6 was proposed) there were concerns expressed around the viability of that idea: i.e. is there enough volunteer capacity to actually do that. In November of 2013 there was a call for more people to volunteer to maintain Drupal 6. That call resulted in 2 people volunteering and while they have done some great work they didn't significantly improve the situation vis-a-vis Drupal 6 support. That's not really surprising since the fundamental problem is that there is no automated test suite for Drupal 6 and there is no interest in manually testing it. So, we're stuck with the position that marking D6 as unsupported at the instant D8 is released doesn't allow for people to upgrade between the two and the reality that D6 is not getting much security support now (and will get less as time goes on and people are even less interested in supporting it). That left us saying "what is the minimum amount of time that we can make the community-based support overlap" and 3 months felt like a good idea.
Note that there are still viable options for getting support. We anticipate that in the months after Drupal 8.0.0 is released that consultants and private companies will advertise services to provide support for Drupal 6. People (such as yourself, perhaps) who want Drupal 6 security patches can consider paying those organizations to do that work. The results of that work will be made available for free somewhere (to be determined) on drupal.org.
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Morris Animal Foundation
That's a joke, isn't it?
There is a D6 patch RTBC (https://www.drupal.org/node/1277140) for about 3 years and has never committed or gone into a release. Not sure what 3 additional months will change here if nobody maintains D6 core since ~3 years. This means zero fixes. No idea what 3 additional months will give us.
This is only about security
This is only about security issues. Sorry if that was unclear.
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Morris Animal Foundation
thank you for clarifing
This is good information, I think three months is enough to move forward, I would recommend others to migration to drupal 8 and skip drupal 7.
Regards
Mohammed
Risky
Sounds like a risky recommendation if Drupal 8 will only have been out as a fresh 8.0 release for 3 months! (based on previous Core major releases)
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Ixis (UK): Drupal support, Drupal hosting.
Each site is different.
Each site is different. Upgrading to Drupal 8 or Drupal 7 depends heavily on the code, configuration and organizational needs.
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Morris Animal Foundation
Thanks
Thanks can we know when the official proaction version of D8 will be released ?
It will be released when
It will be released when there are zero critical issues left and there has been successful release candidate.
Currently there are 93 critical issues. Of those, 12 issues have been identified as blocking a beta release.
No LTS
An additional three months is nice, but by no means this can be called "Long Term Support" (LTS). And it does not help those who are stuck with D6 because essential modules - like 'image' or certain input formats - still do not provide migration paths to D7.
For example, 'image' module - the one that was used on d.o and has been considered the de-facto standard for images in Drupal for years - still has 46,076 users. Three additional months of security updates for core won't change the fact that those sites will have to start from scratch, or continue to run D6 since in the past five years (!) nobody came up with a solution to migrate stuff like 'image_attach' to anything past D6.
The lack of a migration path
The lack of a migration path from image_attach, or indeed anything even half a good in D7 is specifically why I still have a number sites on D6. If D8 is no better in this respect (and I've no reason to expect it will be) I'm not sure what I will do with them. Sadly I don't have coding skills to write a work-around myself and don't have the resources to pay someone to do it for me as these sites are all unpaid voluntary projects.
_
Then you've neither taken it for a test drive or followed any of the progress. The editor/content creator experience has been one of the major items addressed in d8 and the integration of ckeditor with image handling is light years beyond anything in drupal to date!
It is important to remember
It is important to remember that going from one major version of another major version it cannot be expected that the solution to a problem will remain in the same module. For example the update path for image attach is in the new https://www.drupal.org/project/image_attach module. For things that are more complicated, take a look at the migrate D2D module. It has a ui to migrate data from one Drupal site to another.
As far as better Drupal LTS; Drupal 6 has been out for over 7 years. As opposed to Ubuntu LTS, of which server runs out at 5 years.
drupal 8 will be awesome
I think Drupal 8 will be awesome since it is divided into Core initiatives: Mobile, Layouts, Web Services, Configuration Management and HTML5. Thank you for clarifying about D6.
Related discussion
This is a semi-related discussion on Drupal 6 and PHP 5.4+, which is becoming more relevant as hosting providers discontinue PHP 5.2 & 5.3 (and those PHP version are no longer supported):
https://www.drupal.org/node/2336585
Drupal 6 is dead. Long live D6.
The trend should be broken in this case as Drupal 8 is too different from Drupal 7 and so upgrading from 6-> 8 will not be worth it for most site owners with extensive custom code. Drupal 6 is supported on a number of Drupal specific hosting options including Pantheon while currently Drupal 8 is not. All of the best modules on Drupal 6 have not even been ported to Drupal 7, let alone 8, while people (myself included) are actually working on backporting modules to 7 (hey people need it). The "Windows XP" analogy is a good one and could probably even be extended to include Windows 8. I would rather be using an updated version of Windows XP than Windows 8 myself.
Can you be more specific
Does it mostly come down to what contributed modules are available? What cases would you say it would be better to upgrade to D6 or to D7?
The 3 month extension is unlikely to achieve its stated purpose
I totally agree with the line of reasoning that led to the 3 month "extension". Unfortunately, I don't think it adequately addresses the use case it is intended to support. The reality for most site owners who will want to migrate from D6 to D8 is that they have a substantial, reasonably feature-rich site on D6. The reason they wouldn't have upgraded to D7 is likely because of custom functionality that made that process too costly for the benefits of moving over to D7. Sites of this scope would normally require at least a handful of contrib/custom modules, and given the learning curve for module developers on D8 I highly doubt that three months will be adequate time to develop the functionality necessary for the typical site people will be wanting to move from D6-D8. I hope I'm wrong.
Core Issue re-opened
Issue "[meta] Ensure that Drupal 6 sites have a functional upgrade path to either Drupal 7 or 8 before Drupal 6 loses security support" https://www.drupal.org/node/2030501#comment-9772959 was recently reopened.
Is anyone willing to maintain D6 for a few months?
Hello!
Is there any agency that meets the above requirements willing to provide the patches for D6 after the 3 months grace period has ended? If you do, please do get in touch with me at gabriele.sani at oxfaminternational.org with an estimate of what would be the cost for this service (even a rough one will do. We are evaluating options).
Thank you!
Please clarify schdule for Drupal 6?
This post and thread are helpful, but I'm a little unclear about exactly when support for Drupal 6 will end. This is because I'm not clear whether a "release candidate" is the same thing as a "release."
On the Drupal 8 FAQ page it says:
Did the 3 month clock start ticking on October 7th when the first release candidate was posted? Or will the clock start ticking at some point in the future when a version that does not end with "rc#" is published?
Good question :)
A release candidate is not the same as the final release. My personal bet is that we're really a few months away from that.
The 3 months of extended support will start counting when the 8.0.0 is fully released. A full release is without rc# on the end.
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Morris Animal Foundation
D6 support will end Feb. 19, 2016
If this announcement comes to pass:
https://www.drupal.org/node/2605142
and Drupal 8.0.0 is released on Nov. 19, 2015, support for Drupal 6 will end on Feb. 19, 2016.
Officially it will end on
Officially it will end on February 24, 2016 - see https://www.drupal.org/drupal-6-eol.
I don't have any issue with
I don't have any issue with this approach, but I'm not sure 3 months will make much difference given the notice people have had of the impending D8 release.
My own D6 multisite took 5 years to write and has over 1.5million nodes, 229 modules, half a dozen custom modules, a custom theme and 100 or so custom templates. I know for a fact that about 20% of the modules I use aren't covered by D7, let alone D8. The most recent 10 of our multisites only launched last week! We won't be going anywhere for a while unfortunately as it would take several man years to rewrite the lot.
I'm happy that I'll be left supporting my site for a while. As you might imagine I've become quite a D6 expert. Good luck to everybody moving to D7 and D8. Does look nice.
If you need more time to upgrade, you can buy Long-Term Support!
Yeah, it's a difficult situation.
It's hard to realistically plan a Drupal 8 upgrade when many, many contributed modules that won't be ready by February 24th, and you might depend on some of them.
And considering all the custom code you have, it would have been impossible to start porting your modules/themes earlier than a couple months ago, because Drupal 8's codebase been such a moving target. As someone who's been working on porting modules to Drupal 8 for the past ~2 years, I can attest to the fact that it has been hard to keep up with the changes in core!
However, if you need more time to wait for contrib modules, port your custom code and figure out your upgrade path, you can buy Drupal 6 Long-Term Support!
myDropWizard.com has announced it's LTS offering:
http://www.mydropwizard.com/blog/announcing-drupal-6-long-term-support
... but I expect more vendors will be announcing their offerings soon!
D6 LTS a bit of an odd concept
I find D6 LTS offerings a bit of an odd concept.
For a while now D6 has only really been getting security updates, and maybe some bug fixes here and there.
This worked because people were reporting security issues to the security team.
People generally won't be reporting security issues or bugs to these companies so they won't be doing much except fixing issues that their clients report, which a lot of Drupal shops would already do at request if you asked and were paying.
They could take over management of the Drupal.org issue queue and proactively fix bugs and things based on that but I can't really see anyone putting that much time into it.
Likely they'll just be
Likely they'll just be backporting fixes reported for D7 and D8.
D6 LTS program
Seems the security team is trying to have some structure around this: https://www.drupal.org/d6-lts-policy
Drupal 7 was useless Drupal 8 is not ready !
Hello,
If you want to set up a store with Ubercart nothing is ready for Drupal 8 and it is quite ridiculous to upgrade to drupal 7 just to wait for drupal 8.
One of the problems seems to be that Drupal 6 cannot run well with Php 5.6 ? Can you confirm ?
Thank you.
D6 will run on PHP 5.6
Drupal 6 will run on PHP 5.6.
In my experience even fairly complex sites will, however you should do some thorough testing on 5.6 and depending on what modules and custom code is used on a site you may need to do some fixes or apply some patches.
The only time so far that I have had to do a significant amount of work to make a D6 run on 5.6 was mostly related to fixing issues with 3rd party PHP plugins that were external to any Drupal modules.
Thank you so much
Hello, thank you, I feel better :-) Mostly websites should load on php5.6 ? so its not so urgent to upgrade to Durpal 8 anymore :-)
Disappointed and frustrated - Can we still change that?
I am very dispappointed by the handling of version transition by the Drupal community.
Not sure it was decided by the community, more certainly by a team of geeks that cannot understand why ordinary people would stick on old versions.
Why the hell all download links have disappeared? Why not simply let thinks as they are? "Support" does not necessarily need a maintainer, just letting people sharing and discussing issues. The best action would have been doing nothing, sparing lots of discussions, frustrations.
The fact is that DRUPAL is NOT backward compatible. Migrating from Dx to Dx+1 is the same work as going away from DRUPAL.
The 3 options are really insufficient: those who must stick on D6 will need to pay authorized commercial compagnies who have apparently access to stuff that ordinary people won't.
So please keep old versions as they are, all code available.
I don't know the right place to complain. I posted this also
https://www.drupal.org/node/2694709
Thanks
JV
Yeah, it was done really
Yeah, it was done really sloppily this time. I fully agree.
Why the hell all download
They haven't. See the responses that people wrote on your other forum post.
That's incorrect. According to https://www.drupal.org/d6-lts-policy those companies are required to post all their patches publicly at https://www.drupal.org/project/d6lts at the same time as their customers get them, so you could just follow that issue queue to get the same fixes for your site. There's also https://www.drupal.org/project/mydropwizard which looks like it lets you get the same info inside your Drupal 6 site itself.
Thanks,
Thanks,
The releases can still be found, it remains the feeling that pre-D7 is made hard to deal with.
The D6 LTS policy looks cumbersome - need a special module to get update status... Why not simply letting things as they are? D4.7, D5 and D6 were long supported why such kind of discrimination.
JV
You need a special module to
You need a special module to get the status of support provided by the LTS vendors, not update status in general.
Update Status itself (the module that ships with Drupal 6 core) still sort of works, if you just want to know where you stand with actual supported releases that were made on drupal.org. It may not work perfectly, but it will still at least show you modules which have security updates available (e.g. if you are running FileField 6.x-3.13, and therefore are missing the recent security update from https://www.drupal.org/node/2674854, it will show you that a security update is required), which is the main thing that's important at this point.
I think the reason things weren't left exactly as they were is that doing so would mean Update Status would have shown you green checkmarks next to Drupal 6 core and a bunch of Drupal 6 contrib modules, telling you that everything is OK and up-to-date. When in fact it's not, since they are no longer supported.
It may not work perfectly,
Apparently this isn't working for all modules yet quite as well as it is for Filefield though - see discussion in #2681323: 6.x contrib update status plan.
You imagine Drupal easy and smart ? you are dreaming !
Yes, I have the same idea, but I am not hopeless about Drupal doing anything the easy way, or just the smart way...
Available updates
I'm providing LTS Support for all my D6 modules, but update status tells the users it is no longer supported. What the heck is going on here? See #2794127: Available updates reports some Drupal 6 modules as "Not supported" even though they are listed as supported on project pages