[bt-devel] Bug-a-thon II (support lifetime)

[Jonathan Marsden]

Thomas Abthorpe wrote:

> During our last Bug-a-thon, we talked about establishing an End Of
> Life (EOL) support convention. It was agreed during our little
> summit, that most major Linux distros, Free/PCBSD and (soon) windows
> packages have active maintainers to ensure current updates, and that
> we will support current versions at this time.

Clarification please: does this mean that all BT releases prior to 2.3.3
are now instantly unsupported?

There is a *big* difference between what gets released (privately and
somewhat unofficially) into a PPA or personal repository, and what is in
the official current Linux distribution(s).

Will the BT team be willing to support of the version of BT that is in
the current release of each major Linux distro (possibly supporting the
version in Debian testing, rather than the one in Debian stable, since
the inter-release gap for Debian stable is several years)?

I would certainly hope they can do this.  If not, IMO we might almost as
well not include BT in the distros at all, and just use PPAs and other
independent repositories instead, so as to ensure that all new end users
will install a "supported" version of the application!

As a current relevant example: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic just released with
BibleTime 2.0-1 packages in it.  Unless bugs therein are severe enough
to warrant what Ubuntu calls an SRU (Stable Release Update), that *is*
what Karmic has in it.  Period.  Not 2.3.3, not 2.4rc1 either.

Choosing not to support a version of your software in a Linux distro
that was only released a couple of weeks ago seems a little harsh to me.
 If I'd known that this issue was being discussed, much less decided
upon, I'd have tried harder to be around online for the Bug-A-Thon.

The question of how much support will be afforded to the version of BT
that is in "Long Term Support" releases of Ubuntu is perhaps a more
interesting issue to discuss.  We do know that some agencies who make
use of Bible software have policies that only LTS releases be used, so
some folks in the field are using 8.04, and will only upgrade their OS
when 10.04 is released, and then will run that until the next LTS
(possibly 12.04)...

Thanks,

Jonathan