Lemmy v0.19.0 is introducing some breaking changes that, if I add support for in Photon, will break compatibility with instances before v0.19.0. If I don’t add support for v0.19.0, instances with that version or higher will break. How should I proceed?
A: Keep an old version of photon available for people who need to use a pre-0.19.0 instance (medium difficulty)
B: Add a message to login saying the instance must be v0.19.0 or higher, nuke all backwards compatibility (easiest solution)
C: wait until most instances are on v0.19.0 to proceed with B
D: Add code to handle different versions (hardest solution)
I’d prefer that people be able to rely on Photon, and anything that prevents them from doing stuff on photon I see as a catastrophic issue. A looks the most appealing right now.
“A” seems okey, just have an unsupported version with no more updates and just focus on the compatibility with Lemmy 1.19.
no more updates
I see you like to live dangerously with a publicly exposed website that no longer receives security updates
Lemmy is a fast-moving piece of software and you should keep it updated anyway. It doesn’t get security update either
I would just do B.
I have photon set to auto update on lemmy.ca so it would break ours until I upgrade lemmy, but that still seems reasonable.Edit: I lied, I guess I never set that up after all. Still seems reasonable.
How often does it auto upgrade? I noticed that photon.lemmy.ca is on V1.4.2 while the current version is V1.9.4. Are builds failing?
A few quite large bugs are on v1.4.2
Yeah it doesn’t. I was thinking of something else.
I’ll update it now though 😂
How did you think you had it set to auto-update? Just curious how people have their Photons set up
Aww yiss, my instance admin is on top of it 😎
forgetting to update not withstanding
Edit: subscript formatting doesn’t work right with sentences 🤔
deleted by creator
Is A just B but letting admins know what the latest compatible version of Photon is?
What is Photon? I found this linked from somewhere else in the fediverse, but there’s no sticky
It’s an alternative UI for the lemmy website.
Made a sticky post.
I’d guess that this kind of thing will keep happening. Is D so hard because you don’t have any infrastructure in place for supporting different versions? Or because this change will be particularly hard?
If it’s missing infrastructure, it will probably be worth it to spend the time once and implement it.
What I mean is adding code in photon to support any version. I have the infrastructurae for A.
Then you should consider your long-term plans. If you will stay with option A long-term it’s no issue. If you ever decide to switch to option D, it will be easier the earlier you do it.
