[QGIS-Developer] Some thought on LTR

[Nyall Dawson]

On Fri, 2 Aug 2019 at 18:13, Matthias Kuhn <matthias at opengis.ch> wrote:

>    d) Stop shipping bugfixes (hint: joke, that makes the LTR concept
> pointless and anyone can do that today already by sticking to the .0
> patch release ;) )

Actually - jokes aside - this does raise a good question.

We've never (as far as i know) formally defined about what the goal of
the LTR is. Is it:
1. a version of QGIS with every bug fix possible backported
or
2. a version of QGIS with only absolutely critical bugfixes
backported, such as security risks or data corruption bugs

(or somewhere between the two)

Currently, it's very much 1. We see everything backported from crash
fixes to string updates to performance optimisations to backported
API. Maybe this is the problem. Maybe we should only be accepting
absolutely mission critical bug fixes, and the expectation is to see
only 1 or 2 commits between LTR patch release versions. Reality is
that every bug fix, regardless of how trivial it seems, brings with it
the increased chances of regressions into the stable LTR release...

Possibly this is a question we need to raise with our voting panel or
user communities, in order to work out exactly what people's desires
from the LTR are.

Nyall