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

[Benjamin Mack]

To all the contributors out there,
Olly, Michi, Helmut and me sat together during the T3CON and thought
about the next releases, after taking all the input from the community
we got from the last weeks and months. We made the following proposal
that we think fits best. BUT we want and need your feedback so we can
fine-tune and modify this proposal. Once we have a consensus I'd like to
publish a news article in the next weeks, and put up these points on the
Roadmap page of TYPO3.org so people know what they can expect.


We want to make the following suggestion:

1) We really want to stay in the 6-month-release cycle
 * it displays activity in our product
 * it is easier to get changes / features in
 * less discussions whether to merge features into existing stable branches
 * it has been proven to be a good way in the last 3 years.


2) We want another LTS version
 * Depending on the criteria of a project, there is a high demand for
both (bleeding-edge features as well as long-term commitment)
 * Therefore we see a need to keep up with the LTS versions
 * A new LTS version shouldn't overlap too much with the existing one,
which will expire in Jan 2014


3) Maintenance lifetime
 * Currently we support every release for 18 months, except the LTS.
This results in maintaining 4 to 5 versions at a time, which is a lot of
work for the Release Teams.
 * Therefore we suggest to only support the latest stable release and
its predecessor, starting with the release of 6.0 - which means approx.
12 months for each version
 * There would be no change to the LTS maintenance lifetime (3 years).
 * The current stable release would get as much bug fixes as possible
(same as right now)
 * Other releases (predecessor, LTS) = get important and security fixes
(similar to how we deal with 4.5 right now)

4) We don't see the need for defining 7.0 version - yet!
 * We want to embrace 6.x just as we embraced and developed 4.x further.
 * We want stable and consistent 6.x versions to focus on
backwards-compatibility, maintenance and a high-quality product.
 * If it makes sense after a couple of releases to make breaking changes
or add large features, we are still able to raise the version number to
7.0, but this is not the case yet :)


As a result, we propose the following schedule for the next versions:

TYPO3 6.0
 * originally scheduled for October 2012, now postponed to November 2012
 * having all the goodies in there (Namespaces, FAL)

TYPO3 6.1
 * Release in April 2013 (just 5 months to keep up with the release cycle)
 * It is just before T3DD13, to open up development for 6.2

TYPO3 6.2
 * Release in October 2013
 * Marked as the LTS version, supported until October 2016.

TYPO3 6.3
 * Roughly scheduled for April 2014

Apart from that we don't want to announce a 6.4, 6.5 or even 7.0
versions (yet) because we don't really know yet where we will stand with
TYPO3 CMS and where Neos will be in early 2014. Let's not promise
anything that we cannot keep right now.

Please think about it and tell us if you can agree with it via "+1/-1".
If you disagree, also tell us why, so we can try to improve the proposal.

Michael, Olly, Helmut, Benni.