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Drupal 12.0 compatibility planning

Open on Drupal.org →
Created on 23 January 2025, 9 days ago

Problem/Motivation

Related to 🌱 Drupal 11.2 compatibility planning Active for minor core releases.

Drupal 12 will be released at the earliest in June 2026 which is in 15 months. Drupal CMS will need to be compatible on the same day. It is somewhat early to plan for, but also if we don't start, it will come up soon.

At the moment, a lot of modules are included in the default Drupal CMS download, there are some in the base recipe which are mostly non-optional, but there are also all of the optional recipes with their own dependencies. I did not try to count, and I don't know if there's a list.

If a single module doesn't have a Drupal 12 compatible release, then Drupal CMS as a whole won't be Drupal 12 compatible given the current structure.

I think there are broadly three approaches for dealing with this, they aren't mutually exclusive.

1. Very closely track and contribute to the Drupal 12 readiness of all included modules, this is mostly feasible from December 2025 after Drupal 11.3 is released, since that release should include most deprecations that will be removed in Drupal 12. If there are Drupal 12 releases of everything by Drupal 12.0.0-rc1 then that all works. This gives a six month window.

2. Re-organise things so that optional recipes, at least one with significant contrib module dependency chains, are not included in the base project template. This would be feasible once project browser can browse recipes on d.o, especially if there's a way for Drupal CMS to recommend specific, remote, recipes so that the experience is broadly the same as now. And especially once project browser recommendations can be filtered by core compatibility. This could mean that if one or two optional recipes are not Drupal 12 compatible on day one, they wouldn't block anything, and they would become available as soon as compatiblity is declared, without a new Drupal CMS release being necessary. This could mean a handful of optional recipes becoming available to new sites within days of the 12.0.0 release, but without as much crunch pressure on the project as a whole or individual module maintainers.

3. If #2 doesn't happen, and if #1 isn't able to secure 11.x-compatible releases of all dependencies, then we are looking at things like removing optional recipes temporarily and adding them back, or artificially delaying the Drupal core release because of Drupal CMS, which don't seem like good options.

Steps to reproduce

Proposed resolution

User interface changes

Data model changes

Release notes snippet

🌱 Plan
Status

Active

Component

General

Created by

🇬🇧United Kingdom catch

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Comments & Activities

  • Issue created by @catch
  • Comment 8 days ago →
    volanar

    Since the modules can now be installed from the browser, I'm afraid this problem will be bigger. Many applications will have many more modules installed than the basic recipes. This means that when upgrading to Drupal 12, these sites will not be able to update until the installed modules are updated. Ideally, all modules that are installed from the browser should be constantly updated, at least in the same amount as wordpress. When installing the wordpress plugin, I'm not worried that it will work in the future, as everything is updated on time. This will have to be resolved in the near future.

  • Comment 8 days ago →
    🇬🇧United Kingdom catch

    Since the modules can now be installed from the browser, I'm afraid this problem will be bigger. Many applications will have many more modules installed than the basic recipes. This means that when upgrading to Drupal 12, these sites will not be able to update until the installed modules are updated.

    This is a potential problem as well, but it's different to this issue which is about new Drupal CMS installs on Drupal 12.

    Updating of sites from Drupal 11 is a much broader problem - although if the modules Drupal CMS uses are all Drupal 12 compatible on day 1, that will help existing sites too, even if their list of installed modules is a lot longer overall.

  • Comment 7 days ago →
    volanar

    I think it's worth training AI to globally update the compatibility of all modules that are on git.drupalcide.org . This will save thousands of developer hours. I think it's possible now.

  • Comment 7 days ago →
    🇬🇧United Kingdom catch

    @volaner that also has nothing to do with Drupal CMS. Please open an issue against drupalorg but be aware there's already a project update bot that works (it doesn't make commits or create releases due to policy, not technology), so you're suggesting replacing something that works with something that doesn't.

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