[2068] in athena10

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Re: LTS support policy

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tom Fitzgerald)
Sun Apr 5 10:20:31 2009

Message-ID: <49D8BE11.6010407@mit.edu>
Date: Sun, 05 Apr 2009 10:20:01 -0400
From: Tom Fitzgerald <tfitz@MIT.EDU>
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To: Greg Price <price@mit.edu>
CC: Evan Broder <broder@mit.edu>, Debathena <debathena@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <20090405003518.GY21912@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
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>   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.

This is great, but where will the start of Athena support on the
new LTS fall in this schedule?  What I'd care about more is the
interval from when Athena packages are pretty well tested and
supported on it and changes documented, to when the previous
version is desupported.

If the clock starts running on the day the LTS appears and y'all
start updating Athena packages, then 6 months might be tight.  We'd
like to see installations with Athena changes stable for a month
or so before we start upgrading in bulk.

One concern is that we can really only do some upgrades during the
summer or January.  If an LTS appears in June (like Dapper) and
Athena changes don't stabilize until late July, we won't want to
do a rush of upgrades during August or see support for the
previous version end in December.

If an LTS appears in April (like Hardy) and Athena is stable on it
by June, that's ideal.  (I'm hoping that'll be the trend for future
LTS releases.)




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