[Koha-devel] Koha numbering

[Paul]

At 07:34 AM 4/5/2013 -0400, Kyle Hall wrote:
> From what I've I've heard around the water cooler, we won't be switching to
>4.x until there is some major change to the internal infrastructure of Koha
>( like Solr support, or perhaps DBIx::Class support ).
>
>I think if were to ditch the traditional versioning system, that maybe the
>Ubuntu year/month style would. So a major release this month would be
>version 13.04. I'm not endorsing it, it's just a possibility ; )

I would very much like to see something along the "Ubuntu style" as 
*production* is very different from development and product improvement 
and/or security issues (which is great/marvelous, to be encouraged, the 
life and soul of an open-source project, etc)

Many (most?) production environments are based upon a two-year cycle with 
security upgrades; this opinion based on the last twenty years of IT 
proliferation out of my fifty years in IT. Enhancements come down to a 
question of "is it really helpful in our environment?" and "what are the 
risks/costs of modifying a working system?" (Some of us are more/less 
blessed with a permanent sandbox capability and the time/resources to use 
it beneficially for our commercial/charitable goals. But this should not be 
relied upon.)

A two year "LTS" cycle, with a further two years "support", plus one more 
year of "not dropping off the edge of the world" works extremely well as a 
policy principle, which I feel must be based upon a principle of "if it 
ain't broke, don't fix it."  (Ubuntu is slowly getting there - it's now 
nearly trivial to limit apt-get upgrade to security issues only, and 
consider product enhancements at a totally separate level.  Could Koha do 
the same with the "package" option?  One of the reasons that I use tarballs 
is the granularity of looking through the release notes for security issues.)

My $0.2 and YMMV,

Best regards and thanks for all the hard work,
Paul