[Geoserver-devel] Time boxed release mode: proposing some modifications

Hi list,

Altought the LTS idea for geoserver seems to be a good idea for giving a more stable
perception of GeoSever. If the result of introducing this additional “branch” of Geoserver
results in

  • less developpers
  • less addtional features/ less bug merging in stabel version …

Then I prefere the status of today.

We have adopted the philosophy to follow the release notes and depending on the solved bugs issues
do the upgrade or do not the upgrade. The major concern with the upgrade is, will my configuration
migrate without issues. Most of the time this gave no errors.

The question should be asked what is the benefit for the community in having this long term release versions.

The benefit exists if at this moment in the community some are already back-porting bug fixes to specific release
then an economy of scale might can come out of this.

Regards,

Eric

···

On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 2:28 PM, Jonathan Moules <jonathanmoules@anonymised.com> wrote:

Hi List,
If I can chip in as a general observer briefly.

Which brings me to the second source of concern: who is going to be interested in a 1-2 years old release?

From my readings of the user mailing lists, there are still people using 2.1.x and 2.2.x. I don’t know what proportion, but a quick google shows there have been posts stating the use of those versions within the last month.

Right. But in order for that to be viable, it has to be a portion of users interested in support contracts or development projects.
Otherwise how do you justify spending hours backporting patches that will conflict during the backport due to 12-18 months
of code changes in the middle.

I know this line of thinking will make the open source purist unhappy, but we have to be realistic, how much spare
time work do we expect to get on the LTS branch (especially after you just spent 40-50 hours of paid work on or
on top of that same project?)
Personally, if I have to spend spare time, I much prefer to work on something new, it’s time I take away from
family and leisure, if it’s just boring, I simply won’t work on it. Don’t know how other developers feel about it.

Cheers
Andrea

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