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

[Jaak Ristioja]

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Gary Holmlund wrote:
> Jonathan Marsden wrote:
>> 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.
>>   
> We did make a decision on the support issue, but I don't see that it was
> a hard decision. If our understanding of the issue changes we could
> certainly change our position on it.
> 
> How would you define support?  Fixing severe bugs? Answering questions
> about it?  Feature upgrades?

Yes its definitely not a hard decision. We might define "not supported"
as something like:
1) no obligation to fix, but might commit fixes into SVN and distribute
patches to packagers and notify packagers about such bugs.
2) no more bugfix releases, except for critical security reasons or bugs
resulting in data loss.
3) main focus is on newer releases.

But as I said, this is a "might" not a "must" nor "should". I guess that
being too strict about this will just lead us astray. Supporting users
with old versions of BibleTime is encouraged, just don't let it eat up
all of your time.

I think the main reason for not supporting very old versions is that for
us they are difficult to support, so we should encourage packagers to
use more recent versions. But to do so effectively, we need to ensure
packagers that the recent versions are at least as stable as the old
ones. This might require some more testing. But foremost BT definitely
requires quite a lot of refactoring (to produce code that can be more
easily understood and audited by all developers).

BibleTime is great! But personally I don't feel very safe/stable with
the current code yet. It is my sincere hope that the refactoring efforts
(mine and yours) will make BT more stable, modular, maintainable (i.e.
bugfixable) and a better project altogether. - something we can all
fully enjoy hacking on, God willing. :)

Most importantly - praised be God, our Father, and Jesus Christ, our
Lord and Saviour, and the Holy Spirit!

Jaak
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