[TYPO3-core] Official information about the upcoming LTS version

[Oliver Hader]

Hi everybody,

Am 19.09.12 16:22, schrieb Patrick Broens:
> Hi all,
> 
> Thanks for raising this question. IMHO it is not really up to us, the
> Core Team or people reading the core list, to decide if we release a new
> LTS version or not. It is up to the bigger community. The big demand for
> a LTS version made us release 4.5 in the past.

Actually that's not quite true. The 4.5 Release Team back then created
the idea of having an LTS release that still contained the deprecated
methods (which would have been removed with 4.5 but were actually
removed one version later with 4.6) and that still had support for IE6
in the backend.

So, the demand initially for an LTS was low - we just created the demand
by communicating about the possibilities and benefits.

> Is there still a big demand for LTS? I suppose so and I'm absolutely not
> against it. Many companies have a bigger trust in these versions and
> marketing wise it would be good to have one.

There are two aspects with that:

a) LTS covers security fixes for a very long period without the need to
upgrade to the next version (and modifying behaviour, deprecated
methods, etc.)
b) backporting changes from 4.7 to 4.5 has become difficult and if we
think about 6.0 it's just most work that needs to be done (namespaces,
bootstrapping, etc.) - it already happened in the past the obviously
easy patches have been backported and created regressions in the LTS version

So my suggestion for the next LTS are:

a) keep the overlapping short (6 months), which would result in 6.2 LTS
b) keep the regular bugfix maintenance shorter, e.g. 12-18 months
instead of currently 36 months
c) keep the security maintenance extended - like currently with 36 months

Thus, security releases (which we do not and cannot schedule in advance)
don't force anybody to upgrade.

> So instead of trying to answer the questions of the clients now, we
> should first ask if there is a demand for another LTS version. Many
> agencies know their clients very well (I hope so), and a quick survey at
> the bigger agencies would give us an answer soon.

Yepp, I'd be fine with that. But in the end there are a lot of desires -
actually some group needs to do the work. If I look to the current
situation with the changes that need to be backported to 4.5 LTS, I'd
say that we should only create promises that can be kept.

Of course in terms of marketing big LTS promises sound great, but we
just need to be honest - to the community and to ourselves.

Cheers,
Olly
-- 
Oliver Hader
TYPO3 v4 Core Team Leader

TYPO3 .... inspiring people to share!
Get involved: http://typo3.org