[2065] in athena10
Re: LTS support policy
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mitchell E Berger)
Sun Apr 5 09:18:25 2009
Message-Id: <200904051317.n35DHvCc010718@yaz-pistachio.mit.edu>
To: Tim Abbott <tabbott@MIT.EDU>
cc: Greg Price <price@MIT.EDU>, Evan Broder <broder@MIT.EDU>,
Debathena <debathena@MIT.EDU>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 05 Apr 2009 00:59:34 EDT."
<alpine.DEB.1.10.0904050058200.7449@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
Date: Sun, 05 Apr 2009 09:17:57 -0400
From: Mitchell E Berger <mitchb@MIT.EDU>
> On Sat, 4 Apr 2009, Greg Price wrote:
>
> > We will support an LTS release until 6 months after the next LTS.
> > At our discretion we may support it longer if we see people are
> > still using it.
>
> I'm happy with this policy. It doesn't promise anything that could be
> really inconvenient in 2 years, while still providing users with what they
> likely want (having a sizeable upgrade window).
Just to make sure we're clear on this, Greg's proposal isn't just a
reformulation of Evan's; it's a significant change. What Greg proposes
is basically reasonable, though what Evan proposes wasn't (perhaps
he meant to be suggesting the same thing that Greg did, though, and got
the number wrong).
Greg suggests "at least until 6 months after the next LTS." Evan
suggested "at least 2 years." LTS releases are two years apart,
so that would mean desupporting immediately when the next LTS is
available, which I don't think we could get away with.
In any case, while I think "at least 6 months past the next LTS, and
longer if people are using it" is fine, I think you're basically
guaranteed that you're going to have to support Hardy longer than
6 months past Karmic+1's release. Nobody's using Dapper, sure, but
plenty of people have installed Debathena Hardy, several of them on
servers, and many of them on XVM because they can't get a ParaVM with
Intrepid yet. So, I don't think this policy is actually going to solve
the nuisance in maintaining software for Hardy that Evan's forecasting.
Mitch
