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

[Jürgen E. Fischer]

Hi Andreas,

On Thu, 06. Feb 2020 at 16:24:40 +0100, Andreas Neumann wrote:
> Thanks for your valuable feedback. I agree with the different phases of
> an LTR, from being more aggressive with bug fixing to being more
> conservative later on.
 
> About the situation with dependencies (gdal, proj, geos): I wonder how
> other software packages do that who have a longer supported life span? I
> am pretty sure that most commercial GIS software packages offer support
> > 1 year for. Do they typically freeze the dependencies? And maybe
> > backport critical (e.g. security related) issues when necessary?
 
> Would the gdal / proj / geos projects be open to discuss overlapping
> support of the latest versions in their projects? I am talking about
> critical issues, not new providers or features.
 
> Of course, as always, I would also be interested in Jürgen's opinion, as
> his work would be affected by this decision.

IIRC my main concern was the time it takes feature to land in an LTR release,
which might be an obstacle when LTR users are also the ones that contract for
new features.

Of course keeping the dependencies alive can also become tricky.  But that has
been done before (py2 & py3, Qt4 & Qt5, GDAL2 & 3, PROJ4 & 5, x86 and x86_64).

Having a second OSGeo4W repo with old version shouldn't be an issue.  Switching
between two OSGeo4W installs on the build machine shouldn't be an big issue
either.

Actually separating stuff into two repos could make it easier in some aspects
(eg. same package names for different version lines, instead of different names
for different versions of the same software - eg. gdal instead of gdal &
gdal2).  But there will probably be need for more updates as there are more
different versions to track - with interdependencies between them and all with
different release cycles.

Another point was backporting that will get trickier the longer the LTR and LR
can diverge.


Jürgen


PS: Personally I don't find longer^W LTRs appealing.

-- 
Jürgen E. Fischer           norBIT GmbH             Tel. +49-4931-918175-31
Dipl.-Inf. (FH)             Rheinstraße 13          Fax. +49-4931-918175-50
Software Engineer           D-26506 Norden            https://www.norbit.de
QGIS release manager (PSC)  Germany                    IRC: jef on FreeNode
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