[Qgis-psc] QGIS LTR releases -- is it time to pull the plug?

[Mathieu Pellerin]

Big supportive +1 on looking back at what happened during this last month
with the LTR, draw some lessons and take remedial actions.

Most urgently: we _absolutely_ need to stop advertising 3.16.13 LTR on the
website and fallback to 3.16.11 for now; can someone with access to the
website do that ASAP within the next 24 hours?

Once that's done, we should prioritize time fixing the underlying issue,
and discuss how we as a project can avoid failing into this situation
again.

There areI IMHO two crucial points to look into:
- On the technical side, how can we strengthen the process around LTR
releases to avoid _as much as possible_ shipping "broken" releases.
- On the project management side, how can we avoid the perceived lack of
speedy, immediate response to a very serious issue. Shipping problematic
releases is something we obviously should aim at avoiding, but even with
improvements in place, it is bound to happen again. At bare minimum,
whenever a "black swan" incident happens, we should have mechanisms in
place to take bad releases off the website as soon as possible.





On Tue, Nov 16, 2021 at 2:57 AM Nyall Dawson <nyall.dawson at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi lists,
>
> I'd like to start some conversation about the dire condition of the
> QGIS LTR release and what we can do to remedy/avoid this in future.
>
> If you've missed the conversation, our QGIS 3.16 windows releases have
> been completely broken for nearly a month now. 3.16.12 had a critical
> issue which caused lockups in Python code, and now 3.16.13 has
> completely broken projection handling (resulting in loss of CRS,
> hangups when opening projects, etc).
>
> So what do we do? I can think of a few responses we could make:
>
> - Kill 3.16.13 with fire. It needs to be removed from the website and
> all traces of the internet ASAP. Rollback to only offering 3.16.11,
> which is the last good Windows 3.16 release.
>
> - Put out a massive apology (and ask users to step up their funding to
> better maintain QGIS releases in future ;)
>
> - Mark 3.16 as an early EOL. (I can't see anyone interested in
> resolving the actual issue, so we've no way forward here in releasing
> a "good" 3.16 release again.)
>
> - Write the LTR releases off as a failed concept. (i.e. if we don't
> have the resources to maintain them properly, we shouldn't be offering
> them at all and should resort back to the single maintained release at
> any one time situation.)
>
> - Lower the supported period of a LTR release to 6 months?
>
> - Offer "theoretical" LTR releases ONLY as source code, but leave it
> to users to compile themselves and accept responsibility for their own
> packaging of this release.
>
> - Go on a funding drive so that QGIS can **pay** a developer and
> packager so that we actually CAN say we have stable LTR releases
> again?
>
> - ...something else...?
>
> Suffice to say, these are big issues, with big responses. But we're
> also under extreme time pressure here -- 3.16 is broken beyond belief,
> and we DO need to make some public responses asap (i.e. TODAY!!!!)
>
> Nyall
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