Long-term support (LTS) philosophy?

[GNUser]

What's the TCL team's stance on LTS? Is a given TCL release supported only until next release or indefinitely or something in-between?

I'd like to stick with TCL 11 for as long as possible. If three, four, even five years from now I were to ask a question or make an observation about TCL 11 in the forum, would that be acceptable or would there be raised eyebrows?

P.S. The reason I ask is that there is an obvious disproportion between the effort in "upgrading" applications (considerable) and the gain in productivity or delight that comes from using new versions of applications (none as far as this old curmudgeon is concerned).
    I've noticed from historical release announcements that TCL is on a roughly yearly release schedule. Given the mountains of work required to push out a new release, what are the main pros that justify all the work as far as the developers are concerned?

[curaga]

We don't do LTS, not nearly enough manpower. A release is only supported until the next one is stable. However given TC's nature, it's likely any system set up nicely will continue to run for the foreseeable future. I have many such, Rich at one point had a 4.x box running for years, and so on.

Extensions are accepted for older versions, though older than three versions or so may raise eyebrows. Comments about core scripts etc. may still apply to newer versions given the low rate of change, as may questions.

New versions allow access to current applications and hardware support, bugfixes, and since it's now in fashion, cpu leak mitigations.

--

Robert famously said that software doesn't have an expiration date. It's totally fine to keep using your current apps until something external forces an upgrade, for example I'm still on several versions old LibreOffice, it does everything I need it to.

[GNUser]

Thank you very much for the detailed answer. This information will prove handy as I try to find a balance between my hermit inclinations and my desire to contribute to the distro. I love the quote from Robert, thank you.

[andyj]

For the internet facing extensions I maintain like bind, apache, nginx and php, plus the xtables kernel modules and geoip netfilter, I'll post updates usually within a month of upstream changes for the latest TC release. I don't normally update extensions for older TC versions, but I could if someone requested. It just might take longer. I can't help but notice that there are a lot of requests from the forum for updates, but not many offers to help.

[Rich]

Hi GNUser
Correction :

... I have many such, Rich at one point had still has a 4.x box running for years, ...

I post using Opera Ver. 11.52 on a Dell 4100 (850 Mhz Pentium III, 512 Meg RAM) running TC4. The most recent date in the BIOS
is 6/11/2002.

[andyj]

One thing I've noticed about web browsers is that some sites won't serve to browsers they don't know or are older than a certain version. Not that they couldn't work, they just think they're doing us a favor. The joy of living in a world dominated by an insecure and unstable OS.

[GNUser]

Hats off, Rich! That's what I'm trying to achieve. It's hard on my personal machine--I get lured by this or that shiny new feature, then end up regretting it.

andyj, yes the main trouble with keeping an OS for a long time is websites blocking old browser versions. That's one of the best uses for AppImages. For example, the "media player" in my TV room is an old Arch Linux laptop with an IR receiver, which I set up in 2015. Even though the installed libraries are too old to run any browser released in 2020, the machine runs the latest Firefox because the Firefox AppImage includes all the libraries that the browser needs. So if the main/only thing getting in the way of rolling away the years with a particular OS version is web browser "senescence", keep AppImages in mind.

Alas, as andyj pointed out, this is a manufactured problem because there's nothing technically wrong with old browser versions. Thanks go to the inferior (but dominant) OSes out there.

[ferran]

I'm a newbie with TC CorePlus 11.0 but I would like to say that in this year surely I will install 6 or 7 applications from Apps, not all. If you don't update more this apps maybe some apps would be deprecated and unable to run with the newest ones (because it demands another requeriments that we wont get).

Also i want to say I consider your work like author or upgrader. It's fine to read that Juanito, Rich, Curaga, you, etc. did in every application when i search it in Apps.

Only this.