All, On 6/21/16 2:26 AM, jean-frederic clere wrote: > On 06/20/2016 12:12 PM, Mark Thomas wrote: >> Since it seems there is some interest in maintaining 8.0.x beyond >> September, how about we announce that: >> - the monthly release cycle for 8.0.x will end in September >> - new features and bug fixes are unlikely to be back-ported from that >> point >> - security fixes will probably be back-ported >> - further releases will depend on circumstances but are unlikely to be >> more frequent that 6 monthly > > +1 I will try to find the cycles to be the RM from September on.
I forgot that we had had this discussion last year, but this topic came back up at this week's TomcatCon. I believe this was the general consensus from the community present this week: 1. Tomcat 7.0.x is expected to be supported beyond the EOL for Tomcat 8.0.x. I don't believe there were any plans to sundown 7.0.x before 8.0.x, so this isn't a problem. 2. Tomcat 8.5.x should be a "nearly" drop-in replacement for Tomcat 8.0.x. Anything that prevents it from being so should be considered a bug in Tomcat 8.5.x and should be fixed. There are one or two things that could be changed in Tomcat 8.5.x to improve the current situation. 3. A migration guide pointing-out those items which can lead to Tomcat 8.5.x not being a drop-in replacement for Tomcat 8.0.x would be greatly appreciated. Chris Schultz has graciously been voluntold to draft such a guide. NB http://tomcat.apache.org/migration-85.html is too verbose; users are looking for a "these items need to be addressed in order to do a drop-in upgrade" kind of guide. The full migration guide can be used when things don't work well after the short-short version. 4. Setting a definite EOL date is helpful because many vendors will not even consider upgrading from e.g. 8.0.x -> 8.5.x unless there is an EOL on the horizon. In order to force users to upgrade, we may be forced to set this date as aggressively as possible. Conversely, 12 months is about the amount of time that would be required for most users to plan, test, and make the switch. Given the above, I think it's probably safe to re-start the conversation about setting an EOL date for Tomcat 8.0.x. My proposal, adapted from the thread before discussion ceased last summer: 1. Set Tomcat 8.0.x EOL date for 31 May 2018 2. Discontinue monthly release cadence for Tomcat 8.0.x after 8.0.45 3. Make these announcements as soon as we have agreed to the details for #1 and #2 -chris
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