LTM stands for "long-term maintenance". Its purpose is to communicate what we are focusing our long-term maintenance efforts on, such as backporting bug fixes and testing upgrade paths from older releases, so we can balance the need to support previous releases against our need to move forward and develop new features and enhancements. LTM is our way of communicating our intentions for how we are going to balance that. It will help us manage our time and resources as developers, and will help manage certain user expectations for patching older versions and for how long.
LTM does not communicate whether a particular version is production-ready, or stable, or anything like that. We try to ensure every version is of high quality and suitable for use in production. It also doesn't determine compatibility (the version number does that through semantic versioning). What LTM does is help optimize our contributor efficacy by helping developers avoid wasting their time patching, merging, and testing countless previous versions concurrently, avoid exponential growth in the number of possible upgrade paths to test, and avoid wasting time troubleshooting bugs in older versions that were already fixed. It also helps provide predictable upgrade paths for users and encourage them to upgrade with greater confidence by following well-tested upgrade paths. By communicating a release as LTM, and linking to what that means (https://accumulo.apache.org/contributor/versioning.html#LTM), we hope users will be able to make informed decisions about when to upgrade and to which version. For example, if a user deploys 2.0.1 (non-LTM), they will know that there is not expected to be any further 2.0.2 or later patches. Instead, they can expect to either backport bug fixes themselves to 2.0, or they can upgrade to a minor release to get the bug fixes rolled up alongside newer features. However, if they want to use 1.10.1 (LTM), they can expect that important bug fixes will be patched in a 1.10.2, etc., without any additional risks that newer features might bring. In summary, the theme here is effective use of contributor resources, managed user expectations, and informed user choices. It is not a statement about production-readiness, just a data point to help users make decisions for themselves by understanding what the upstream project's intentions are for a given release. Apologies for my lack of brevity, but I hope this clears up our intentions around LTM. We anticipate the next LTM will be the branch currently under development, and our next release. It may be called 2.1.0, or 3.0.0, depending on decisions yet to be finalized. I had hoped we would have released it earlier this year, but we're not done with some things we want it to include. It's close, I think (within a few months), but I don't want to make predictions right now. On Tue, Oct 19, 2021 at 7:13 AM Ligade, Shailesh [USA] <ligade_shail...@bah.com.invalid> wrote: > > Hello, > > On the accumulo download page, only LTM version is 1.10.1, does that mean > accumulo 2.x should not be used for production yet?- Any timeline when 2.x > will be LTM? > > Thanks > > -S
