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Supporting 1.4.x [was: Releasing 1.6]

From: Julian Foad <julianfoad_at_btopenworld.com>
Date: Thu, 07 Aug 2008 10:33:10 +0100

Hyrum K. Wright wrote:
> Peter Samuelson wrote:
> > However, if all you mean is to do a regular 1.6 release by branching
> > trunk to 1.6.x soonish, that's a different matter. That seems OK, so
> > long as it doesn't imply shortening the serious-bugs-and-security-fixes
> > support window of 1.4.x too drastically.
>
> We wouldn't change the process for 1.6, just the time frame. 1.6.x will be
> branched from trunk.
>
> I have no data on this, but it feels like the 1.4.x line is already dead in most
> developers' minds.

Just a word about maintaining 1.4.x:

I don't suppose you meant that to sound how it sounds to me. Certainly
active development of 1.4 is dead, and developers need not concern
themselves with it most of the time, but I hope we have no intention of
dropping support for it any time soon.

I often find myself being one of the many users (of other software) who
is not able to upgrade when they want to, and so I recognise the
importance of providing "official" support and maintenance for a fairly
old version to the wider user base. Think of all the novelists,
architects, students, and other diverse users who get Subversion in
their operating system distribution packages and don't have the
time/energy/skill to install a version not provided by their
distributor.

My OS distribution* is only 9 months old and provides svn-1.3.1. If I
were a normal user using what I'm given, I might upgrade and get svn-1.4
around the end of this year or next year and be using it until 2010 or
2011. To us developers, that may sound "ridiculous" and "unnecessary",
but for normal users that is normal life.

If we can keep providing "official support and maintenance" for 1.4.x
while in practice finding there is almost never anything serious enough
to back-port, that's the best of both worlds.

- Julian

[* SuSE GNU/Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 SP2.]

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Received on 2008-08-07 11:33:51 CEST

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