[QGIS-Developer] Some thought on LTR

[Marco Bernasocchi]

Hi all

On 05.08.19 18:05, Paolo Cavallini wrote:
> Hiii all,
>
> On 05/08/19 11:10, Matthias Kuhn wrote:
>> On 8/5/19 1:00 AM, Nyall Dawson wrote:
>>> 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
>> That's a very good question.
> thanks, very important indeed. I assumed we decide for 1.
> In fact, experience showed that it is preferable to be more
> conservative, and only include fixes with very low chances of
> regressions.

I see two "technical" and one economical issues here.

- there is a sort of "regression obsession", IMO bugs are bugs, and they
should ideally be fixed whenever possible (also see Jürgen's answer on
another tread [1])

- assessing a "low chance of regression" is a gray area and as Nyall
said before "...every bug fix, regardless of how trivial it seems,
brings with it the increased chances of regressions into the stable LTR
release..."

- on the economical point of view,  limiting the bugs that can be fixed
in an LTR will make it very difficult to actually get larger users to
pay for bug-fixing, they are the target group for the LTR and slowly
they are understanding that fixing bugs needs resources. To me limiting
the amount of bugs that can be fixed in an LTR would be a very unwise
move since it would also reduce the number of bugs that get fixed in non
LTR releases.


>  I don't see a way to decide other than relying on the
> developer's assessment. The only (costly) improvement I'd see is having
> another independent core dev to check any bugfix before accepting it.
> Cheers.

Cheers

Marco


[1] https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-psc/2019-August/007525.html
-- 
Marco Bernasocchi
OPENGIS.ch CEO
QGIS.org Co-chair
marco at opengis.ch <mailto:marco at opengis.ch>
+41 (0)79 467 24 70 <tel:+41794672470>

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