Proposed update to Prometheus LTS release

[Julien Pivotto]

From: Julien Pivotto <roidel...@prometheus.io>
To: prometheus-developers <prometheus...@googlegroups.com>
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: Proposed update to Prometheus LTS release
Reply-To:

Hello Prometheus community,

As you may be aware, the first Long Term Support (LTS) release of
Prometheus was made in July of this year. I initially promised 6 months
of support for this 2.37 release, but I am now proposing to increase that to
one year.

In order to make this possible, I will need to upgrade the underlying Go
version from 1.18 to 1.19. This is necessary in order to ensure that the
LTS release remains under a supported version of Go, as 1.18 will be end
of life before the one year of support for the LTS release is complete.
The upgrade will require some changes to the build process, specifically
for Windows, in order to ensure compatibility with the new Go version.
However, I do not foresee any changes to the codebase itself in relation
to the Go upgrade.

I am currently working on the necessary changes and plan to release an
updated version of the LTS release in the coming weeks. I will keep the
community informed as the work progresses and provide details on the
exact timeline for the LTS support lifetime.

Due to the inclusion of additional features like native histograms and
out of order ingestion, the next LTS release of Prometheus is likely to
only happen in 2-3 releases. These features touch some of the critical
code paths of Prometheus and will require additional time to stabilize
before being included in an LTS release. Even if these features are
still considered experimental at the time of the next LTS release, I
believe it is important to give them more time to mature before making
the LTS release.

I welcome any feedback or suggestions on this proposal. Please let me
know if you have any concerns or questions.

Thank you for your support of Prometheus.

PS: This email has been partly generated with ChatGPT.

--
Julien Pivotto
@roidelapluie

[Julien Pivotto]

Sorry for the inline headers. This gives me some space to speak about
the changes related to Windows.

go 1.19 introduces a netgo flag for windows that bypasses Window's
resolver for a go resolver. This prevents Prometheus to use Windows'
/etc/host equivalent, which means that localhost can't be resolved.

Prometheus 2.40 contains this issue and we will not build prometheus
with netgo on windows to revert to the old behavior.

--
Julien Pivotto
@roidelapluie