> We would like to discuss the possibility of upgrade of the django version
> used by LTP(loco.ubuntu.com on cranberry.canonical.com) and how this could
> impact the OS upgrade & other apps running on the same server, right now we
> are still using an unsupported version(1.3.x i think), we want also to know
> the version of django that's is going to be installed so we can make
> changes to the code before.

First of all, let me apologize for how long this ticket has lingered.
We made some changes to our estimate of the work needed that caused it
to placed low in our queue.  I've updated the ticket and its queue
position is now much more useful.

cranberry was upgraded to precise in July 2015.  precise ships version
1.3.1 of Django with security fixes backported by the Ubuntu Security
Team.  While 1.3 may be unsupported upstream, it is still our
preferred option for precise hosts as it receives support from Ubuntu.

We have previously mentioned that we have precise backports of later
versions of django available, but these are of versions that are not
currently supported by Ubuntu and so they are difficult to recommend.

For the moment, while the site is hosted on a precise server, I would
recommend sticking with 1.3 and addressing problems exposed by the
Ubuntu upgrade.  For example, Elizabeth Krumbach reported that feeds
were not updating.  This seems to be due to the following:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/srv/loco.ubuntu.com/loco_directory/articles/management/commands/refresh.py", line 50, in handle_noargs
    feed.update()
  File "/srv/loco.ubuntu.com/loco_directory/articles/models.py", line 71, in update
    self.last_updated = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(time.mktime(getattr(data, 'modified', time.gmtime())))
TypeError: argument must be 9-item sequence, not str

which looks like it may be due to the Python upgrade.

Regarding the future of loco.ubuntu.com, I would recommend selecting
an Ubuntu LTS release to target, ideally xenial (but trusty would be
fine), porting the site to its supplied version of Django (1.8 or 1.6,
depending) and writing a Juju charm or charms to deploy the new site.

In the meantime, as an interim step, if you were to backport Django
from xenial or trusty in a PPA yourselves and update the site to work
in that situation (i.e. on precise but with the new django packages)
then we could use your backport and install it on cranberry.  But bear
in mind that precise will only be supported until April 2017, so doing
that backport may not be the best use of your time.

Please let us know what you think.

Regards,