On Sun, 12 Dec 2010 11:28:12 +0100 Dieter Plaetinck <die...@plaetinck.be> wrote:
> interesting question. > Isn't it already in our guidelines/recommendations somewhere that > Arch users need to update their system regularly (at least weekly or > so), and if they don't like that, Arch is not for them? > I would say we only stretch this support period for the maximum amount > of time needed, not a timeframe we just make up. > > As far as I know, the biggest bottleneck are release media. > So I would say: we support upgrade paths from system as old as the > latest official release media, or newer. > In this case, the newest release is 2010.05, so if a users system was > last updated in April, that's too old to still support upgrades. > > There is a potential edge case / race condition when new, breaking > features are released shortly after a media release. (or in other > words: users would need to upgrade right away when new official images > are released), maybe we should take oldest release + 1 month, or so. > > If we'll ever be at a point where we do frequently official > releases (like each 3 months), we probably don't want to force users > to download the new image if they have one of 3 months old. We can > capture that in our statement as well by saying something like "we > support upgrades on systems as old as the oldest release media whose > age does not exceed 6 months (unless the latest release media are > older then 6 months, in which case we support from then and onwards)" > > Dieter Also, something I implied, but I should probably say explicitly: I think there's nothing inherently bad about being relatively strict in what we support. Currently, a lot of systems already have something unsupported about them (packages from aur, unofficial mirrors/repos, recompiled from ABS, ignorepkg/ignoregroup/noupgrade settings, etc). If you know what you're doing there's no problem. This is why I think we shouldn't stretch the support period needlessly, those who know what they are doing can keep an old system if they want that. Dieter