Ralph Upgrade Strategy and Planned Changes

[vi4m]

2025 Upgrades and deprecations

Hello Ralph Community,

As part of Allegro’s commitment to maintaining and improving Ralph, we would like to share our upgrade strategy and planned modifications to the project, to make the project modern and maintainable in the future. This will be also discussion how we can move forward together.

Upgrade Strategy

Our main goal is to update Ralph to a newer version to ensure long-term maintainability. Given the complexity of the project and its reliance on many third-party libraries, we have decided to follow a “version-by-version” upgrade approach. This method ensures that we execute all necessary Django migrations sequentially, from version 1.8 to the latest stable release. While this may seem like a longer route, we believe it is the safest way to keep the project stable and functional throughout the transition.

We have successfully upgraded Django to version 2.2, which required significant modifications. However, we expect that future upgrades will be less demanding.

Streamlining Ralph

To improve maintainability, we plan to slim down Ralph by removing unused or outdated modules. Some modules are no longer in use at Allegro and have not stood the test of time. Our approach to deprecating these modules will be gradual and involve the community:

First, we will disable unused modules in the codebase – they will still be available in the source code but not active by default.
If the community does not express interest in keeping specific modules, they will be permanently removed in a future update.
We encourage the community to provide feedback if there are any modules you believe should remain in the project.

Timeline

March 2025
Deprecated features:
VIPs
Security Scans

April 2025
Removed features:
VIPs
Security Scans

End Year: 2025
Django 3.x full upgrade

Community

Your input is valuable, and we appreciate your support in making Ralph a more efficient and maintainable tool. Looking forward to your thoughts!

Best regards,
Allegro Ralph Team

[fajfer]

Thank you @vi4m - can you update the message in the README then? I think the current wording is too discouraging for new users to encourage them to use the software

[vi4m]

Thanks, agree I think we should update the wording in README.

[vi4m]

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