[TYPO3-core] Proposal for the upcoming Roadmap and LTS

[Mario Rimann]

Hi

Am 08.10.12 22:44, schrieb Jigal van Hemert:
>> 6 month to upgrade from 4.5 LTS to 6.x LTS looks short to me, because
>> * there might be a huge amount of instances in the wild, which are
>> targeted to upgrade only from LTS to LTS. This means higher workload in
>> the 6 month phase, additionally to the usual workload of new projects.
> 
> A good reason to not skip so many versions and upgrade regularly...

Well, isn't the whole LTS story intended for exactly that target
audience that want a stable system which is maintained for an extended
period in time, so that the lifetime of the TYPO3 installation is
maximized (and with this the amount of payed upgrades reduced)?

Or how do you sell these upgrades to your customers? Do all of them have
a payed SLA with you that cover your work to upgrade each and every of
your customer installations from minor version to minor version
throughout the year? I can't imagine that.

When I read this mail and from what I've discussed with some of the core
devs in the past months, I fear that at least some of you have a very
different viewing angle onto this whole topic as some of the users
(agencies and their customers) have. I personally like the LTS version a
lot, as it gave us and our customers a lot of stability - and to be
honest, the LTS version is also a selling argument!

As I tried to explain in an older thread, compared to the time when
4.5.0 was released, TYPO3 lost a lot of lifetime if you compare the
following two situations:

- In Q1/2011, a customer buying a 4.5.x based website got support for 3+
years. Since we apply the patch-level updates for free, the customer has
a secure system without being charged (only pays the fee for the hosting
of course)

- If the same user would buy his website now (Q3/2012), his Installation
will have an expected lifetime of just about 1.5 years - almostly
independed of whether he gets a 4.5.x LTS based TYPO3 setup or a 4.7.x
based version (differend of the two EOL dates is 6 months)

So for a customer, the product TYPO3 CMS is varying in quality, just
depending on *when* the customer buys/get's his website.

With the longer release-cycles (up to 4.4), this problem did IMHO not
exist as every minor version up to 4.3.x was maintained for roughly 3
years and the overlap was long enough. Switching to the 6-month
release-cycle brought up this problem IMHO, which was now "healed" with
the LTS-version, but when I think about it a bit, the LTS just postponed
a real discussion/decision like this one for 1.5 years.

I'm open to discuss this here, on the phone or also bring in our wishes
from an agency perspective to the next core-team meeting if we can
arrange that. As far as I got it from talking to other agencies, we at
internezzo are not alone with our above mentioned issues with the
current release-cycle.

Best wishes,
Mario