Personally I think it would be of great benefit if Enterprise vendors just stopped doing that extremely long term support. It just enables the people who want to pretend they can stop the world around them and those people are bad for everyone, especially in a security context but also because they pretend that “stability” is achieved by using old versions.
This is how I know you need to learn more about the Enterprise, about long-term support, and stability. Everything you wrote sounds like “Smoke detectors and seat belts are for chumps”
I know a lot more about those topics than I ever wished I would.
Stability doesn’t magically appear because you leave the version number unchanged. Stability is the result of qualified people (hint: people backporting patches in 100s of projects they barely know aren’t very qualified in comparison to the main developers of those projects) making well-informed changes to a project and then testing them.
Old versions with backports are still new versions, just new versions with a smaller user base and less testing.
Stability is also much harder to achieve if you do certain tasks rarely, e.g. only every 10 years, since nobody will remember how to do them.
Upstream supports those old releases only begrudgingly because every feature that needs support across all versions in use is held back by those extremely long term support versions.
I am not objecting to the goal of stability, I am objecting to the snakeoil that pretends you can achieve it by using the same version number all the time basically with a forked branch of the code that contains cherry-picked changes.
This is how I know you need to learn more about the Enterprise, about long-term support, and stability. Everything you wrote sounds like “Smoke detectors and seat belts are for chumps”
I know a lot more about those topics than I ever wished I would.
Stability doesn’t magically appear because you leave the version number unchanged. Stability is the result of qualified people (hint: people backporting patches in 100s of projects they barely know aren’t very qualified in comparison to the main developers of those projects) making well-informed changes to a project and then testing them.
Old versions with backports are still new versions, just new versions with a smaller user base and less testing.
Stability is also much harder to achieve if you do certain tasks rarely, e.g. only every 10 years, since nobody will remember how to do them.
Upstream supports those old releases only begrudgingly because every feature that needs support across all versions in use is held back by those extremely long term support versions.
I am not objecting to the goal of stability, I am objecting to the snakeoil that pretends you can achieve it by using the same version number all the time basically with a forked branch of the code that contains cherry-picked changes.