On Tue, 2008-08-05 at 12:54 -0700, chromatic wrote: > On Tuesday 05 August 2008 12:35:50 Geoffrey Broadwell wrote: > > bugfixes that should be backported to one or more already released > > versions and re-released immediately. > > I can see patching the previous release in case of a critical bugfix, but if > we get in the habit of encouraging users to expect updates of anything older > than the previous stable release for free, we've doomed the project.
That's why I was careful to say 'one or more'. As in greater than zero, but other than that it's a separate policy decision that I was not trying to address in my previous message. > Point releases every month. Major releases every three months. Agree, except I'd like to hear more about how you define a 'major release'. > Complete and > utter refusal to support users who expect that they can install Parrot 1.0 > and get free support from the mailing list or IRC for the next eight to ten > years. Half agree. I agree that we should only *directly* support a release for a limited time, though I think the minimum sane time would be "major release before current one" -- 3-6 months at any given moment, given your above schedule. In other words, just because we do a new 3 month release, doesn't mean we immediately de-support the one we did just 3 months ago. Now, I might argue for a longer direct support schedule than just 'most recent + 1', but I think any less than that can't work in real life. Beyond that, I think we need to explicitly acknowledge that distro packagers have a longer schedule to care about. While we may not support them directly, we still need to have a process in place to make sure they are notified about critical problems that may apply to previous releases, so that they can go back and check/patch their versions. We should also facilitate any process that will help different distros to help each other to backport our trunk fixes in a timely fashion. In short, we don't have to do the hard work for the distros ourselves, but we can't leave them out in the cold, either. -'f
