[wp-hackers] Wordpress 3.0, can we finally get a LTS version?

[Mark Jaquith]

On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 10:01 AM, Jeremy Clarke <jer at simianuprising.com> wrote:
> +1 for backporting security patches by one version. This will let enterprise
> sites have ~6months between mandatory upgrades instead of 3, which would
> make a big difference, while also keeping it reasonable for the devs.

That's not why I want to do it... and if we backport one version, we
wouldn't enable them to safely skip versions. If we stop doing
security backports for 2.9 when 3.1 is in beta, they have to upgrade
to 3.0.latest at that point. What I want to avoid is offering someone
a choice between x.(y-1).latest, which is insecure, and x.y (i.e.
x.y.0) which is potentially (and historically) less than stable. We've
done that before. That's a fundamentally crappy choice.

I completely agree with what Matt said in the other e-mail about
actual LTS releases. I'd fight hard against that, as  I was the one
twisted under the impossible task of keeping our 2.0 LTS experiment
going. And I don't want to enable people to stay on old versions for
long periods of time because of developer laziness. But I don't think
it's lazy for a developer to want to keep their clients on 2.9.x until
3.0 has been out for a bit, and more plugins have been updated. Many
people "wait for the x.y.1 release" as a matter of principle. We have
had situations in the past where a branch of WordPress goes from the
stable recommended version for everyone, to a completely deprecated
and insecure version, in an instant. Again, I don't want any sort of
long term support (we shouldn't support the old versions in Trac or in
the Support forms), or anything more than essential security
backports. I just want people who don't want to upgrade on day 1 to
have options if a security issue should present itself on day 2.

This should have little effect on most of our users, as I'm not
proposing we present this in any way in the WordPress interface —
they'd still only have the option of updating to the latest and
greatest.

-- 
Mark Jaquith
• http://markjaquith.com/
• http://coveredwebservices.com/