Strip down supported major releases of ownCloud?

Development
#1

Hi,

currently the following releases are still supported by ownCloud:

  • 8.0
  • 8.1
  • 8.2
  • 9.0
  • 9.1

This means there are currently five supported major releases available. Whats the purposes of having so many different supported versions?

I think a lot of issues and resources could be saved if that could be stripped down to e.g. only three available versions (eg, like "oldstable", "stable" and "fresh" or similar).

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#2

Current versions are supported for 18 months, and we have a release cycle of 3 major versions per year. Not sure what your preferred way would be, we could shorten the support period to 12 months, release two new major versions per year, or we switch to a LTS-model, with some intermediate major versions with shorter support period.

Downside of the LTS-model would be that the intermediate version are intensively tested because many focus on the LTS release only.

#3

Not quite sure about this but just wanted to throw in that 5 supported major releases are really overkill. I'm not using a single software on my desktop or server which are providing that much supported major releases. Even PHP has only three: 5.5, 5.6 and 7.0.

#4

Android (versions still in use, perhaps not supported)? But I agree, to have more than 3 version is hard to support. Everything must be backported, tested, and documented.

You can't change the existing support intervals. 9.1 is a version with long support, and it will be the last one with php 5.4 support. 9.2 could have a shorter support, ...

#5

It really all boils down to two problems:

  1. We need a more reliable update process so we can motivate people to adopt releases quickly
  2. We need to investigate a way for those who can't follow through swiftly, i.e. LTS releases. At least for those we would need direct upgrade pathes, similar to Ubuntu's LTS policy (upgrade to the next consecutive LTS releases is supported, a jump across minor versions is required otherwise).
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#6

Where can I find the current supported oc versions and how long they are supported?

#7

See: https://github.com/owncloud/core/wiki/Maintenance-and-Release-Schedule

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