Re: Re: [security-announce] openSUSE Leap 42.1 has reached end of SUSE support

On Wednesday, 17 May 2017 15:18 Mathias Homann wrote:
> ...have we at any time in the past ever had a situation where there
> was only ONE version of openSUSE officially supported?
> 
> I mean, Leap 42.3 is not out yet...

Current situation is quite different from what we had earlier. In the 
old model, each new version was really new, forked fresh from Factory, 
so that there was in actually no real "major" and "minor" version. As 
new versions came each 6 or 8 months (more or less), noone could blame 
users who did not want to do a full upgrade to new codebase so often. 
That's why there was an overlap between [n] and [n+2], so that you could 
skip e.g. 12.2 and upgrade directly from 12.1 to 12.3 without losing 
support at any moment.

With Leap 42.x, core packages (mostly) follow SLE ones where the policy 
is that upgrading in a new service pack should be well reasoned, not 
just "hey, there is a new upstream version". And this logic should apply 
to most of the distribution - or at least that is the plan. There are 
exceptions, of course, as some packages do not fit into this model well 
and some maintainers do not agree with this policy, but in general, Leap 
42.x and 42.(x+1) should be much closer to each other than e.g. 12.1 and 
12.2. Therefore users should fear upgrading to next point release less 
and it should make much less sense to skip 42.2 and upgrade 42.1 systems 
directly to 42.3.

What is a different story, though, is moving to new major version with 
completely new codebase. IMHO we should think very carefully about the 
overlap of lifetimes of last 42.x and 43.0/15.0/whatever it is called. 
IMHO it would make good sense to have longer overlap (12 months?) 
between those.

                                                        Michal Kubeček

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