It's been a year, and seems to be a good time to revisit this topic while those folks who are present at ApacheCon can discuss f2f the merits of bringing the 2.2.x chapter to a close, and share their thoughts back here on-list.
According to http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_details/ws-apache/2 the inflection point of a majority of 2.4 instances over 2.2 appears to occur about 9 months from now. OpenSUSE 13.1 adopted 2.4 way back in Nov of '13. Ubuntu - 14.04 LTS, and Debian 8 (Jessie) switched to 2.4 in April '14. RHEL / CentOS 7 are well over a year old, adopted 2.4 in June '14. Fedora 18 shipped 2.4 way back in Jan '13. E.g. every user of the broadly distributed Linux releases will have had three full years to adopt 2.4 by June of 2017. I expect the BSD world looks similar (modulo any Apache License 2.0 stupidity we are all too familiar with.) If someone in the BSD, Solaris and other spheres wants to chime in here with those milestones, that would be great. I am prepared to RM a final bug-fix release of 2.2 in conjunction with the next 2.4 release effort, to gather in any final requests for fixes before we move to a 12-month, security-fixes-only window on that branch. Once those 12 months expire, as we've done with 1.3 and 2.0, there's the possibility that relatively few committers would collect some critical patches/apply-to-2.2.xx final security fixes, but no further releases would occur. Are we ready to start the 12 month countdown as of the next/final bug fix release of 2.2, and highlight this in both the 2.2 and 2.4 announce broadcasts? I'm hoping we conclude some fixes of 2.4 scoreboard regressions and get to the point of releasing 2.4 with mod_proxy_http2 sometime within the next month or so, and that we can reach a consensus about how we will proceed on the 2.2 branch, before we get to that release. Feedback desired, Cheers, Bill
