Let's not forget that working on open source software is quite different than working on proprietary software. For open source, you work on what you need and you share what you've done with others. Some people need JSF 1.1 and will be working there. Some people need JSF 1.2 and will be working there. Some will need 2.0. Keeping it all consistent would be ideal, but realistically, everyone needs to work on what they need. To say that no work will be allowed on JSF 1.1 is not helpful. Yes, it'd be great if everything applied to one branch can be applied to another, but if someone is still working on JSF 1.1 fixes and features, they may not have access to JSF 1.2 or 2.0.
My suggestion is that we keep this in mind and allow for some flexibility. It may be that some work committed to 1.1 remains as a JIRA item until someone needs it in JSF 1.2 or 2.0. And a bug fix to 1.2 may remain as a JIRA item for 1.1 until it's needed. As an example, I'm doing a lot of work with a legacy app these days (which is why I'm not actively doing JSF development) and it uses Cayenne 1.1. That's now 4 versions old as Cayenne has transitioned from 1.1 to 1.2 to 2.0 to 3.0. I don't expect the cayenne community to support my needs by back-porting all bug fixes, but I do have the ability to back-port and maintain those fixes myself as a developer, even though the branch is not officially supported by the project. And at the same time, if the problem I fix is still an issue in 3.0, I'm not expected (or required) to make sure that every version of Cayenne after 1.1 has that fix applied. I would open a JIRA issue, but since the architecture is quite different for later versions, it would be up to someone using a newer version to solve and apply it (with or without the code I used to fix it). On the other hand, I would typically try to also fix it for 1.2 since the ease of applying such a patch is greatly reduced. Myfaces Core and Tomahawk has always been very weak on providing bug fixes for older versions. If anything we should be trying to make that task easier rather than more difficult.
