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Excerpts from Thierry Carrez's message of 2017-12-13 22:26:49 +0100:
> Doug Hellmann wrote:
> > Excerpts from Michael Still's message of 2017-12-13 10:59:37 -0800:
> >> Do we continue to support the previous two releases as stable branches?
> >> Doesn't that mean we double the amount of time we need to keep older CI
> >> setups around? Isn't that already a pain point for the stable teams?
> >>
> >> Michael
> > 
> > Is the current stable policy based on the number of releases, or their
> > age?
> 
> The stable team defines the maximum age they keep stable branches before
> EOLing them (currently: 12 months). So the proposition, in itself, would
> not extend the time we need to keep older CI setups around.
> 

Assuming no other changes, the proposal would actually reduce the
amount of time during which we support more than one stable branch,
then, right?  Because we would effectively only support the active
development branch and one stable branch during a given year.

Feb 2018 - Rocky development starts
Feb 2019 - Rocky development ends; S begins
Feb 2020 - Rocky support dropped; S ends; T begins

I think John's original proposal included changing stable lifetime
to continue to support 2 branches simultaneously. That would mean
something more like

Feb 2018 - Rocky development starts
Feb 2019 - Rocky development ends; S begins
Feb 2020 - S ends; T begins
Feb 2021 - Rocky support dropped; T ends; U begins

Of course, that doubles the length of time we would support Rocky
(and subsequent releases).

So, this aspect is going to need some more discussion.

That said, I'm more interested in settling the question of whether
changing the development cycle helps development teams in any way
before we consider other effects. Because if it doesn't do any good
then there's no reason to solve problems we won't have, and if we
agree it *does* do us some good then we're motivated to work out
the other details.

Doug