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

[Gary Holmlund]

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?

Perhaps the issue is to understand the rules for updating a BT version 
in a distribution. Suppose we wanted to fix a severe bug in a BT 2.0 
release and put it into a 2.0 fixes branch. What is the process for 
getting this update into Karmic, Jaunty, or Hardy?

Would this process be any different if we wanted to base any fix on the 
BT 2.1 or 2.2 fixes branch, assuming that these versions have compatible 
dependencies with the distribution?

Gary