Dear Community,
It seems we need a stronger definition of LTS, that was one of the
things that came up at the 12.0 release retrospective.
Our current policy is to have one LTS per year. we only support the
latest LTS, Support means providing patches for critical issues.
What ideas/requirements faced up so far:
* LTS should last long. At least for three years like Ubuntu. It seems
to me that there is a fear of upgrading. Ideally my colleagues would
like to get just bugfixes without essential upgrade (Jaroslav
Tulach, Oracle)
* We shall think of not making LTS versions, let those be the pain of
external distributors (Neil C Smith)
* LTS support shall be overlapping we shall not end the support of one
LTS right after the next one came out.
* There shall be a quarterly update release, preferably about one
month after the last .x release, if we can do that (that's from me)
* Maybe something else, I've missed, please add that here...
My thoughts:
What I think is we shall let the hands of 11.0 LTS go, as we have not
promised that it would get supported after 12.0 is out. That was built
with the old release process. The new pipeline (thanks to Eric) is more
suitable for releasing updates. My experience with the upcoming 12.0-u1
is pretty good so far.
I think we need to announce the end of life of 11.0 LTS as well.
So I think we can support an LTS for 1.5-2 years with quarterly (maybe
less frequent) updates, starting form 12.0 beyond that it is probably
shall be sponsored/maintained by external distributors. (Sponsored here
would mean, that a PMC member from that distributor shall step up and
take care of the PR organization and the release process, the community
still have to vote for it, and the resulting nbm-s are served by the
Apache UC. Maintenance would mean that the whole process could happen
outside of a fork of the release branch, we won't need to create a
release and, no votes are required, but the resulting nbm-s would be
distributed on the third party distributor specific UC.)
What do you think?
--
Laszlo Kishalmi
