Hello,
I just wanted to share my thoughts from the users-perspective:
Whenever there is a LTR-Version of a software I use that for production
environments. For QGIS however, I always have both the LTR and the
current version installed. The reason for this is my personal experience
with bug reporting in QGIS. In the past I submitted a few bug reports,
one of them was patched within a couple of days, but it took two months
until it was released in the LTR, while it was released within the
current branch within one month. Afaik changes have to be approved for
the LTR-release, so it may take more time. Another bug I reported three
weeks ago was also fixed within days, but the backport release went
stale and the backport was closed by the qgis-bot. I don't know if
things will improve if qgis-devs who don't seem to have time to review
backport-changes, need to spent even more time they don't have on manual
testing.
Right now I use LTR for daily work and the current version if I
encounter errors, if LTR is being released only every few months I'm
gonna start using the current version and only switch to the LTR version
if I encounter errors, because it most certainly has less bugs in the
functions that exists in both versions and for production environments I
prefer less bugs.
Cheers
Am 28.02.2023 um 08:55 schrieb Andreas Neumann via QGIS-Developer:
Dear QGIS devs,
The QGIS release schedule for LTR versions was recently "thinned out",
as part of a decision to introduce "manual testing" prior to release -
see QEP 239:
https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals/issues/239 - see
also the release schedule at
https://www.qgis.org/en/site/getinvolved/development/roadmap.html
Quote from the QEP 239: "LTR releases will no longer have monthly
patch releases, but instead a 4 months cycle releases, coincident with
the release of the stable version".
I can understand the reasoning behind that decision, because "manual
testing" is a lot of work and it was also heard that many users don't
install patch releases too often.
However, the situation is, that there is also a "quarantine rule" -
which is not mentioned in QEP 239 - but it helps to prevent untested
patches to end up in LTR versions, by delaying the backports until the
backport was first tested in the non-LTR stable release. There had
been a number of examples where this quarantine rule helped prevent
regressions in the LTR version introduced by backports in the past.
So, I think this quarantine rule is useful to have.
However, it doesn't match well with the decision to "thin out" the
release schedule of the LTR version. There can be situations where a
user will have to wait 4-5 months, until a backport ends up in an LTR
release, which is a rather long time. We should bring this down to 2
months, like in the past.
My proposal is to "revisit" the decision of the "thinned out" release
schedule and only "thin out", 6 months after a version became LTR.
Any thoughts? Especially from the commercial support providers? How
would your customers react to the fewer patch releases?
Thank you for the discussion,
Andreas
--
Andreas Neumann
QGIS.ORG <http://QGIS.ORG> board member (treasurer)
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