CAS EOL Policy Proposal

The CAS project management committee has been reviewing a proposal on CAS release policies, maintenance and lifetime. In particular, this proposal attempts to provide answers to the following questions:

• How long should a CAS release be maintained?
• What is the appropriate scope for release maintenance once a release is retired?

Today

The project has been handling release management and maintenance in a semi-official capacity. Today’s release practices typically are:

• Patch releases, once every 30 days.
• Minor releases, once every 3-4 months.
• Major releases, where appropriate based on community demand and technical landscape.
• Security patches, whenever needed and preferably as soon as humanly possible.

There is no official policy to indicate the lifespan of a CAS release. Maintaining multiple release lines in an adhoc fashion is a very time-consuming and difficult process where the development team has to ensure patches across releases are ported backward or forward correctly and that changesets are properly cherry-picked into the target release, tested, documented and made available.

This process is simply not sustainable.

Proposal

To mitigate some of this pain, the following proposal and a decidedly simple one at that is in the making:

• CAS adopters MAY EXPECT a CAS release to be maintained for one calendar year, starting from the original release date.
• Maintenance during this year includes bug fixes, security patches and general upkeep of the release.
• Once the year is passed, maintenance of the release is STRICTLY limited to security patches and fixing vulnerabilities for another calendar year.
• The lifespan of a release MAY be extended beyond a single year, to be decided by the CAS PMC and the community at large when and where reasonable.

By “CAS Release”, we mean anything that is a minor release and above. (i.e. 4.1.x, 4.2.x, 5.0.0, 5.1.0, etc).

What does this mean?

The above policy, once in effect, implies that the following CAS releases will transition into a security-patch mode (SPM) only and will be EOLed at the indicated dates.

All past releases that are absent in the above table are considered EOLed.

Misagh Moayyed