https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=39174 Bug ID: 39174 Summary: Search::Elasticsearch is end of life and will at some point not be compatible anymore with future versions Change sponsored?: --- Product: Koha Version: Main Hardware: All OS: All Status: NEW Severity: normal Priority: P5 - low Component: Searching - Elasticsearch Assignee: koha-bugs@lists.koha-community.org Reporter: victor@tuxayo.net QA Contact: testopia@bugs.koha-community.org tl;dr if someone curious has the time to check if the ES 9 beta works with Search::Elasticsearch , it will help to know if we should immediately worry about Search::Elasticsearch being EOL. If it's not compatible, things will might be a bit tough. (slightly less tl;dr, jump to "Conclusion") Announced here mid 2022 https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-perl/issues/220 It got mentioned in Bug 33353 but the issue might have been too distant at the time. And we didn't have any ES 9 preview to works with nor LTS Koha versions to account for. We now have the 1st preview of 9.X, a beta: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/tags If things didn't change much in their workflows, that would mean around half a year before the 9.x release and EOL of 7.x: https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-8-release-date/202759/2 We might think there is still a lot of time before v10 release and v8 EOL. Which is the moment when we would have an issue. Since we have v8 support it's okay. But just with regular Koha versions and even more with LTS, it's important to know if to support v9 it would break v7 compatibility. Because such a major change is not great to do in the life of a Koha release. Like ES 8 support couldn't be backported because it broke ES 6 support. Even if it was EOL, that was an issue. If waiting mid cycle of ES 9, and if Search::Elasticsearch isn't compatible with it. It might be too late to fork it and fix stuff in Koha. Or find another way to communicate with ES (and change even more stuff in Koha which would definitely not be backportable regardless of ES 7 support). By the time it's ready (past ES compat work took time while being simpler), the LTS and maybe also the latest Koha release at the time might be still stuck with official Search::Elasticsearch. And during their lifecycles, ES might be out of date. ES release dates: ES 6: 2017-11 ES 7: 2019-04 ES 8: 2022-02 ES 9: ~2025-10 likely It really depends on how long the time will be between ES 9 and ES 10. We might not have to worry about regular Koha releases unless ES are quick. But if in November 2026 (which is not that far when looking at Bug 25439 for ES 7 in 2020-05. It came into fruition for 22.11 with bug 25669), so if by then we don't support ES 9 (if ES 9 won't work with the current lib), then 26.11 LTS might be stuck with EOL ES 8 before it's own EOL in 2030-05. Which would be for **more than half it's life** if ES 10 comes out in mid 2028 which would be a 2.5 year dev cycle which isn't crazy when looking at the history. Hopefully it keeps getting longer as ES is mature. But no way ES 10 comes as late as 2030. Missing ES 9 support for Koha 26.11 is sure to lead to the issue of having to backport it during it's life which might be problematic if the changes are too big. Conclusion: So despite things seemingly being very far away, with the ES 9 beta now, there is a broom wagon[1] that has started to slowly makes it's way forward. - And with not really pessimistic delay for us to get ES 9 support (which might be especially tough this time) - Our LTS timeline - A not really pessimistic delay between ES 9 and ES 10 We can already foresee that broom wagon catching us before the finish line (the full cycle of Koha 26.11 LTS) (Such dependency management is really Sisyphus cycling and having to stop if not finishing soon enough. And then having to wait for the broom wagon for way longer than they were pedaling! 🙃 Over and over, wondering if they will make it each time. Did I miss something? Is this really our fate? 🤣) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broom_wagon Or with another analogy, it's early morning, we are hiking and turns out we can already foresee the sun going down before we reach our destination. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are watching all bug changes. You are the assignee for the bug.