Confirmation of LTS proposal status

[Roger Klorese]

Have TPTB made a decision on the four-releases proposal? If so, what is it? And if it is to go, does it begin when 1.19 comes out (1.16-1.19) or when it formerly would have dropped off (1.19-1.22)?

[Tim Pepper]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 9:35 AM Roger Klorese <roger....@suse.com> wrote:

Have TPTB made a decision on the four-releases proposal? If so, what is it? And if it is to go, does it begin when 1.19 comes out (1.16-1.19) or when it formerly would have dropped off (1.19-1.22)?

Discussion on the latter (extend patch release lifecycle of 1.19 and later) resolved into consensus to do that.  Discussion on whether to also do the prior (extend patch release lifecycle of 1.16, 1.17, 1.18) has stalled.  I partly see that stall as a sign we're maybe not sufficiently resourced in the context of everything else going on at this point in 2020 to think about continuing support for older releases.  Maybe the world is more settled in the coming months and year and we're more comfortable making an explicit choice then for 1.17 and/or 1.18 before they've gone out of support.

As current events have pulled focus away from project activities, it does probably implicitly mean 1.16 gets a bit more patch release lifetime than would have otherwise happened.  Whether that happens for 1.17 and 1.18 will depend on if/when 1.20 and 1.21 releases happen relative to the prior stance of supporting release N-2, N-1, and N.