[Gluster-Maintainers] Release scheduling and lifecycle of versions

[Kaleb Keithley]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Pranith Kumar Karampuri" <pkarampu at redhat.com>
> To: "Amye Scavarda" <amye at redhat.com>
> Cc: maintainers at gluster.org
> Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2016 8:38:19 PM
> Subject: Re: [Gluster-Maintainers] Release scheduling and lifecycle of versions
> 
> hi,
> Some of our managers were cautioning us to use the term LTS with care as it
> means something else in ubuntu world where LTS is how they make money by
> providing support. I see that quite a few open source projects have similar
> release cadence but they don't call them LTS. They call them stable
> branches. May be it makes sense to call them stable branches and feature
> branches rather than LTS/non-LTS? Suggestions for other names is welcome. At
> least we need to clear any confusion that we are not looking to make money
> out of the LTS branches :-D. Different name for the branches is preferable.

I'm certainly not an authority, but Ubuntu.com (versus Canonical.com) says that even "regular releases" are _supported_ for nine months.

Versus the LTS releases, which are also _supported_, for five years.

It's reasonably clear to me that when Ubuntu.com says its releases are _supported_, they're talking about there being a steady stream of bug fixes and updates over the life of the release. And if someone wants real support – like the kind that Red Hat sells for RHEL and RHGS – they'd need to write a cheque to Canonical.
 
But we don't need to guess, we can just ask our resident legal counsel, who will tell us if there are any implications to calling our planned long life cycle release of Community GlusterFS an "LTS release."

Off hand I wouldn't expect there to be, but––

Richard (and Ric) what, if any, implications are there? Should we pick a different name?

--

Kaleb