This is probably slightly touching on the issues Jarek and Kevin were
discussing in the release announcement however i think it warrants its
own thread.

Firstly i'd like to thank everyone for their hard work in 2.3, I
haven't had time to try it out yet but i do look forward giving it a
spin.

We run a fairly large Airflow installation that has been running from
early in the 1. series.

One thing i've observed since the start of the 2 series is that the
minor releases 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 contain quite ambitious feature changes.
These series often don't mature until 2 or so patch releases. I am not
pointing fingers here it's just the nature of shipping software.

When a new minor release comes out any outstanding fixes for the
previous series (2.2) now get moved and applied to the new series
(2.3). This can be quite problematic for a user, either bite the
bullet and do a risky upgrade to a .0 release or run our own build
with the given patches applied. The obvious issue with the latter is
your potentially running different code paths to everyone else which
makes getting support hard.

As far as i am aware the larger vendors maintain their own builds with
extra patches applied. For smaller teams (or new users) doing this is
prohibitive. I guess this is one of the selling points of paying for a
managed service.

Would it be possible to continue support for the previous minor series
with patch releases whilst the new minor release matures? I know such
a thing isn't uncommon in other projects such as Postgres (all be it
with major releases).

Obviously I am aware a lot of time and effort goes into cutting a
release, for which I am eternally greatful :-)

R

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