[wp-hackers] Long term suckage

[Dougal Campbell]

On Jun 18 2010 11:49 AM, Matt Mullenweg wrote:
> While I like the theory of LTS, what happens in practice is it covers 
> up the incompetence of IT or developers because they put off small 
> slightly painful upgrades until they get so out of date of trunk (3 
> years? 5 years?) and you have to go through a giant, painful, screws 
> everybody over upgrade. 

Yeah, but I think what we're* talking about here is more realistic. 
Maybe we should call it "STS" (Short-Term Support) instead of "LTS"? I 
don't think we have to make any commitment (official or otherwise) to 
support any particular release for years. But if we could just support 
the "current-minus-one" release up until the time that the 
"current-plus-one" version came out, it would provide a 
not-too-unreasonable window for those who hesitate to upgrade to the 
shiniest new version, for whatever reason.

For a pure feature release, like 3.0 (AFAIK there are still no known 
security holes in 2.9), it's not that big a deal. But if someone 
theoretically discovered a 3.0 security hole 3 months from now which 
also affected 2.9, I think it would behoove us to backport the patch 
into the 2.9 branch and do a point release, even if backporting the fix 
is a pain in the neck due to code refactoring.

The main thing here is that it would be nice to have "official" support 
from the core team, even if it's community members at-large who do the 
actual bugfix backporting. Yes, I'm sure that if this had occurred in 
the past, such patches would have been welcomed, but there has been no 
stated process around it. It would be nice if someone would actually say 
that such patches would be reviewed, and that there would be a "real" 
-minus-one update release.

Here's a possible pain-point:  if you are running 2.9.2, and there was a 
2.9.3 release while 3.0 is current, I'm assuming that the updater will 
only show you 3.0 as an upgrade path. I'm guessing this could be 
addressed with a plugin, though.

   * And when I say "we", I'm really only speaking for myself. :)

-- 
Dougal Campbell <dougal at gunters.org>
http://dougal.gunters.org/
http://twitter.com/dougal
http://twitual.com/