On Sat, 20 Sep 2008, netgeek wrote:
Don't get me wrong: I would love to see us support all releases for 24
months (or even more) after they ship. I think our users would appreciate
that also.
Perhaps there is a middle ground here? What about a statement that each
major branch (6.x, 7.x) will be supported for at least 24+ months from its
last production release? Smaller periods of support could be given to minor
releases along the way (7.2, for example), but at least companies would know
that if they installed a 6.x version, they'd have support for a couple of
years, even if that might mean upgrading to a newer minor version if there
was a problem.
This is precisely what we already do -- we guarantee we will support the last
release on a branch for 24 months after the release. The point of concern
being discussed is that we can't tell you for sure which minor release will be
the last release at the time that release goes out the door, because the
extent to which we keep releasing on old branches depends in large part on how
the new branch looks.
Right now, it sounds like 6.4 will be the last minor release on the 6.x
branch, but I think it would be a mistake to commit to that decision until 7.1
has settled in for a few months and we believe firmly there is a good
migration path forwards to the 7.x branch. 7.0 was arguably one of the most
stable .0 releases we've ever done (perhaps the most stable -- 4.0 was pretty
good though), so it seem almost certain 7.1 will be really stable, but stable
is what happens when people install it and it works well in practice, so
there's always a wait-and-see element.
Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
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