Hi,

For me a LTS release should focus on IDE quality and API stability, so people can use that release as a basis to build applications on top of the platform. As a consequence it's _we_ that should be releasing it. I wouldn't set a date for the LTS release: just create a branch and work on it until the next version is ready. Also NetBeans LTS should work well with Java LTS and have the approval of the NetCAT team.

Doing a LTS release each year is unnecessary/requires too much an effort, I think. I'd make a LTS release only on major Java LTS announcements or milestones, every few years.

Cheers,
Antonio

El 9/7/20 a las 0:10, Laszlo Kishalmi escribió:
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



---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected]
For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]

For further information about the NetBeans mailing lists, visit:
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/NETBEANS/Mailing+lists



Reply via email to