[GRASS-dev] What long-term support means for GRASS GIS?

[Markus Neteler]

On Fri, Feb 10, 2017 at 3:26 PM, Vaclav Petras <wenzeslaus at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I know we've already touched on that, but I'm still unclear about what
> "long-term support" means for us.

This is indeed to be clarified.

> The release announcement for 7.2 says:
>
>   As a stable release series, 7.2.x enjoys long-term support.
>
> which is more or less the same what 7.0 announcement says:
>
>   As a stable release 7.0 will enjoy long-term support.

Copy-pasted :-) However, only since 7.2 is there, a new policy needs
to be decided. Of course this should have ideally been done before the
7.2.0 release.

> Both are from a stable branch, i.e. not development (=trunk), both are
> releases, i.e. not daily builds or something like that, and finally both are
> stable releases, i.e. not release candidates. So what the long-term support
> means? Are all GRASS GIS releases long-term support?

At time we actively support
- GRASS GIS 6.4.x
- GRASS GIS 7.0.x
- GRASS GIS 7.2.x

Probably the 7.0.x support should be changed to "important fixes if
still possible without major rewrite of code".

The 6.4.x support will be naturally reduced anyway (like the 5.4.x
support which somehow silently disappeared when neither distros
shipped it any longer nor requests came in).
Still all versions are in SVN and fixes could be applied.
https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/browser/grass/branches/

So far I think that actively telling "this is the last release of
x.y.z" does not much make sense since the day after an important
bugfix may come in :-)

> Is it in comparison to other software support policies? How it would look like if would have
> release which is not long-term support? What should we communicate to users
> and potential users?

Yes, we should check some policies:
- http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/160347/qgis-ltr-vs-other-release
(from 2015)
- https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals/blob/master/QEP-4-QGIS_Long_Term_Releases.rst
- https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS

Ideas?

Markus

> Thanks,
> Vaclav
>
> https://grass.osgeo.org/news/42/15/GRASS-GIS-7-0-0/
> https://grass.osgeo.org/news/66/15/GRASS-GIS-7-2-0-released/