[Qgis-psc] Formal request to extend LTR life span to two years

[Even Rouault]

> Now, I'd like to find out under which circumstances QGIS.ORG would be
> willing to officially support QGIS LTR version for 2 years.

A few thoughts:

One aspect to take into account is how you organize the time for this 2 year 
lifespan. Some weeks ago I floated around the idea of having 2 phases in the 
LTR: a first phase where rather "aggressive" backports are allowed to be able 
to potentially fix design issues in new features, and a second one where just 
critical bugfixes are allowed given a risk/advantage assessment: a one-liner 
fix to avoid a crashing bug is OK, but a 1000 line code change to fix a 
crashing bug in a odd case scenario not. Of course with a number of grey 
situations in between... With a 2 year lifespan, anyway this will probably 
become more obvious as the difficulty to backport fixes will increase over 
time.

There's also a packaging point of view to take into account (thinking to 
OSGeo4W in particular). For a 2 year LTR, you likely need to make sure that 
the dependencies of the LTR are controlled independently of the ones of QGIS 
master. You might want to decide to update one of the dependencies in the LTR 
(like upgrading to a new patch release of a dependency), but this must be a 
choice, not a mechanical consequence of an upgrade of QGIS master.

Another thought is that some dependencies of QGIS (thinking to GDAL & PROJ) 
don't have a 2 year life span for a given release, but more a 1 year one.

Even

-- 
Spatialys - Geospatial professional services
http://www.spatialys.com