Hi Steve, I have a feeling that there is a slight misunderstanding here, for which I'm sorry. Please allow me to clarify some things.
On Tue, 2022-05-31 at 07:31 -0500, Steve Ebersole wrote: > The reality is that we are a very small team - it is simply not > feasible to maintain that many branches[1]. Of course. I myself work in a small team as well, I know that it is really hard to support old software versions. We hardly offer extended support to our own users as well. > [1] Though really, point me to any project / product the size and > complexity of Hibernate, not to mention user base, that supports as > many code bases for free that you are asking. I am not asking that at all. Sorry if it seemed that way, it was not at all my intention. I can imagine that Hibernate developers sometimes receive demanding requests from users who want free long-term support. I despise that, and I am well aware of the fact that the company I work for uses Hibernate under a gratis license, without any warranty whatsoever. Also, I have a lot of respect for people who put their spare time in a free- and open source project (as does the company I work for). > You are not asking about "time to upgrade" anyway, in my opinion. > You are asking about removing the need to upgrade, which is very > different. No! I am not asking that at all! I am just trying to manage the expectations of my team members and helping them to upgrade to Hibernate 6 in a timely manner. At the same time I am trying to provide some feedback to the Hibernate developers. > Us stopping support for 5.6 does not mean you can no longer use > 5.6. It simply means we (this very tiny team) will no longer back- > port changes. > You can continue to use it; and in fact, since it is open source, > you can even continue to do these back-ports yourself. I think the reality is that people who use software that has been declared end-of-life by their suppliers often don't backport it themselves. I've unfortunately seen enough cases of this happening... (If it isn't clear by now, I am a big proponent of updating software in a timely manner instead of feet-dragging until you drown in "upgrade debt".) > As for a statement on the website, I'm not sure exactly what that > would look like. Your suggestion is just vague. "X months"? How > many months is that? 2? 24? Big difference. I put the X there deliberately. It is not at all my place to make decisions on this; how long users of older versions should receive bugfixes, and indeed if they should receive updates at all, is something that only the Hibernate developers can decide on. > E.g., you realize 6.0 was released exactly 2 months ago to the day > right[2][3]? That is "months" already. And I have already said we > will continue to support 5.6 for the time being, so that will be > "months"++. The rest of your statement is in fact exactly what we > do already[4]. I'm not against adding something to the website if > it helps clarify things, but that wording is not it. > [2] https://in.relation.to/2022/03/31/orm-60-final/ > [3] That was 6.0.0.Final. Including CR releases (which I do) its > been many, many months. > [4] 6.0 has been out for months. 6.1 is about to be released. And we > are still supporting 5.6. Sure. I'm not making any demands here. It is great that 5.6 will still receive updates for some time. My suggestion is just that the Hibernate developers put some statement on the website regarding what to expect in terms of backporting. The text I provided was just an example. If you would say that Hibernate devs would stop backporting fixes for 5.6 tomorrow, then I can make a compelling case to my colleagues that they should prioritize the upgrade to 6.0, meaning that we would upgrade earlier. But right now there is no such statement at all, meaning that it is hard to make this case, which results in us not deciding on prioritizing our upgrade. I hope this makes sense. > P.S. To be fair, by "reduce doubt among Hibernate users" you mean > *your* "doubt". Which is fine, but let's not extrapolate that to > all Hibernate users. Sorry, I think the word 'uncertainty' instead of 'doubt' would have been the better choice. English is not my first language... The uncertainty comes from not knowing whether the Hibernate release someone is using will receive backported fixes or not. I did not mean to extrapolate that to all users. Maybe I should have put "uncertainty among some Hibernate users" there as I do not in fact know whether many users experience this uncertainty. However, I am not the first one to voice this uncertainty, so it is not just *my* uncertainty either: - https://discourse.hibernate.org/t/hibernate-orm-versions-end-of-life-details/6354 - https://discourse.hibernate.org/t/end-of-life-hibernate/2772 I just noticed the backporting information linked to in that second forum thread, here: https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-orm/wiki/Huge-Project,-Small-Team However, the information in that wiki article is now outdated, and also doesn't seem to reflect the current practice of the Hibernate developers. (it also speaks about 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 being "major" releases, while the convention is that these point releases are called "minor" releases: https://semver.org/).
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