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

François Suter fsu-lists at cobweb.ch
Fri Sep 21 09:02:30 CEST 2012


Hi Michael,

>> In addition as already pointed out, I really dislike that the 6month
>> >  release cycle topic is questioned again and again.
>
> Who questions it? Did I overlook that?

At least I have frequently, in the past (not in this thread... yet).

Starting with the original question:

I think it's Jigal who reminded us of the original reason for having LTS 
and that was good. I think that - retrospectively - it was a good choice 
from the point of view of development: we could have a stable release 
for several years and that gave us the freedom to make more important 
changes after that. I'm not sure we would have had the 6.0 that is in 
the making if we couldn't "rely" on the rock-stable 4.5.

As others have said, our marketing team and our clients just loved LTS. 
This was an unplanned side-effect, but it makes a lot of sense, as 
clients don't like to pay for upgrades which - most of the time - bring 
new features that are not useful for them. Our clients are not 
heat-seeking geeks.

Now I still think that the 6-months release cycle is too short. We end 
up *not* using most of the TYPO3 versions, all the more so because 
there's 4.5 LTS. Ever since 4.5 was released we built a single web site 
with 4.6, because that release contained a feature that was critical for 
this client. The only site running 4.7 is our company's own, which was 
more like a test than anything else. We have a couple of clients 
currently going through the upgrade process, which is not entirely smooth.

We are not considering upgrading any client to 6.0. We will certainly do 
small sites with that upcoming version, but the uncertainty about DAM is 
a killer for large sites. Of course you could say our clients could pay 
for helping develop DAM 2.0, but what is their need since they have a 
nice 4.5 LTS running for 2 more years yet?

I agree that maintaining a LTS version requires more resources. But I 
also think that release so many major versions so often is a waste of 
resources too. I would like to work far more strictly with minor and 
major versions. 6.1, 6.2, etc. should contain new features that don't 
break anything, that don't bring major changes to DB, API, rendering, 
etc. Big changes should be slated for 7.0.

And of course - by the time - I hope not to have to deal with 7.0 but 
with Phoenix...

To sum up my thoughts: yes, we should have another LTS, as it is really 
appreciated by clients. This LTS should happen in the 6.x branch and 
should be the end of it. Further developments would go to the 7.x branch.

Cheers

-- 

Francois Suter
Cobweb Development Sarl - http://www.cobweb.ch


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