Upcoming Releases Schedule...

[Jo Rhett]

On Sep 5, 2008, at 1:19 PM, Ben Kaduk wrote:
> Normal
>    Releases which are published from a -STABLE branch will be
> supported by the Security Officer for a minimum of 12 months after the
> release.
> Extended
>    Selected releases will be supported by the Security Officer for a
> minimum of 24 months after the release.
>
> I don't remember seeing any speculation about 6.4 being an extended
> release, so, EoL is 12 months after release, whenever that actually
> happens.

Okay, so 6.3 will EoL at roughly the same time as 6.4.  Why should  
anyone spend any effort on 6.4?

> That's the difference between a long-term-support branch and a  
> regular branch;
> many OSes do that.  If you want to run the same machines for a long  
> time and
> not have to do a huge battery of tests (at the expense of getting  
> new features
> and better performance in the interim), you use long-term branches.
> The regular branches that get released later, will then become  
> unsupported
> at the same time as the (older) long-term branch.
>
> Yes, it's poor when a long-term branch goes EoL before there's  
> another one
> ready to take its place, but if the new one isn't ready, then you  
> just use
> whichever regular release is current and then snag a long-term release
> when it becomes available.  Yes, it's more work, but that's life.


Is it just me, or does this make no sense at all?

This does make it clear to me why the release team can't find the  
resources to do longer support.  Who can convince their company to put  
resources into the mainstream release effort, when this kind of cycle  
basically forces every company to run their own internal release  
process.

-- 
Jo Rhett
Net Consonance : consonant endings by net philanthropy, open source  
and other randomness