As the maintainer of several Django-related packages and a contributor to many more, I see the policy as fair. Most maintainers have little capacity, and anything to reduce that burden is welcome.
Third-party packages typically test with a matrix of Python versions against Django versions. Letting that grow large makes writing code harder, testing slow, and wastes CI computing power and energy. Users using Django 3.2 can still install and use old versions of third-party packages. Aside from data loss bugs or security issues, third-party packages dropping support for 3.2 to 4.1 will probably have little effect on such projects. > Secondly, it would help me if end dates of both mainstream and extended > support were set to specific dates. This hold true for all end dates in the > release schedule on https://www.djangoproject.com/download/ . > For example, the end date of extended for Django 5.1 ends either in December > 2025 or per 1st of January 2026, which is not clear to me. I believe this > difference to be relevant for organizations scheduling updates. Django versions make one release per month (if there are any changes). This is typically the first Monday but depends on fellow availability and the state of any pull requests. That’s why there’s no date commitment. After any initial bugfix release date in the final month of release, it’s unlikely that any further drastic bugs will be discovered and backported to the branch. Also, I have never encountered a Django project that upgrades within or near the final month of support. There are two camps: those who upgrade proactively (either to each release or LTS), and those who don’t (often found running a ten-year-old Django with custom backports). I doubt that a more concrete date would help with scheduling updates. If it helps get resources, assume the first of the month, or better yet push for margin and aim to upgrade 6 months before EOL. On Wed, Oct 25, 2023, at 8:45 AM, Wim Feijen wrote: > Hi, > > The release notes of Django 5.0 state: > "Third-party library support for older version of Django¶ > > Following the release of Django 5.0, we suggest that third-party app authors > drop support for all versions of Django prior to 4.2. At that time, you > should be able to run your package’s tests using python -Wd so that > deprecation warnings appear. After making the deprecation warning fixes, your > app should be compatible with Django 5.0." > > However, Django 3.2 is supported until April 2024. Would it not be > recommendable for third-party packages to support Django 3.2 as well? > > My proprosal is to remove the above warning entirely from the release notes, > or to change the first line to "From April 2024 on, we suggest that ..." > > Secondly, it would help me if end dates of both mainstream and extended > support were set to specific dates. This hold true for all end dates in the > release schedule on https://www.djangoproject.com/download/ . > For example, the end date of extended for Django 5.1 ends either in December > 2025 or per 1st of January 2026, which is not clear to me. I believe this > difference to be relevant for organizations scheduling updates. > > Thanks for considering this, and for the awesome work on making Django better > and better! > > Warm regards, > Wim > > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Django developers (Contributions to Django itself)" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/38ace698-489b-4a66-86d6-bb755e932008n%40googlegroups.com > > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/38ace698-489b-4a66-86d6-bb755e932008n%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers (Contributions to Django itself)" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/29d8a725-3ea7-40f7-9cca-7aa4ad675224%40app.fastmail.com.
