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> They keep old releases in their CI configuration and block PR’s from being merged if they don’t work on older release lines. If you are doing that, shame on
by tscs37 9y ago
> They keep old releases in their CI configuration and block PR’s from being merged if they don’t work on older release lines.
If you are doing that, shame on you, that's not how stable and long-term-support works at all. If you backport, you backport on a best-effort basis, not on a must-have basis.
There is 0 sense in supporting old versions when you just backport all the new stuff into them anyway.
>You, in your GitHub project, probably don’t have the time or resources to manage more than one release line of development.
That is certainly true. Over the whole essay I don't find much reason not to have a LTS schedule.
I don't have to backport all the stuff to older releases. My own policy is that any previous release will receive security patches as long as I can be made to care (usually about 1 year and in one case I support a 3 year old release of a project with security patches)
It is not that much effort to patch security stuff. It doesn't take you away from your project for days, it costs you a few hours and some users of your project will be happier for it. That's all I want.
- nirvdrum 9y agoAgreed. I'd go a step further and say requiring constant upgrades to get even security patches makes semantic versioning essentially pointless. It doesn't really matter that the version number indicates an API change if my only choice is to upgrade or get completely left behind. I hit this a lot of with the Rails ecosystem. In many cases, upgrading to the latest version of some gem was more disruptive or riskier than keeping the current version and patching myself. But some devs will also yank old versions making that tricky as well. Rails itself, however, does a remarkable job of providing both patches and backports for security issues. I'd like to extend a big thanks to anyone that does expend extra effort to provide a solution to existing users. When having to deal with a security issue, nothing's more frustrating than not being able to upgrade immediately because doing so entails API changes or incompatible dependency graph changes.
- ProblemFactory 9y ago> I don't have to backport all the stuff to older releases. My own policy is that any previous release will receive security patches Besides it being easier, isn't not porting feature patches the entire point of Long Term Support releases? People use LTS because they don't want any unexpected behaviour changes, only security updates.
- tscs37 9y agoYeah it's basically the only way you should be doing LTS.