Interim support guarantee for FreeBSD 12

[Roger Marquis]

FYI re potential cuts to STABLE long-term support.  Does this affect the
RELEASE branch as well?  Anyone know where this is being discussed?  The
announcement mentions community feedback but that seems unlikely given
there has been no mention of it on the freebsd-security list.

Roger Marquis


>Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2018 11:04:48 -0400
>From: FreeBSD Core Team Secretary <core-secretary at FreeBSD.org>
>To: freebsd-announce at freebsd.org
>Subject: [FreeBSD-Announce] Interim support guarantee for FreeBSD 12
>
>Dear FreeBSD community,
>
>The Core Team, in consultation with Release Engineering, the Security
>Team, and Port Manager has decided that we need to reevaluate the 5-year
>support of stable branches starting with stable/12.  A changed security
>landscape, increased toolchain velocity, and shorter support windows for
>our upstream components necessitate this reevaluation.
>
>We will be leading discussions on updating our support model, with the
>goal of making the model sustainable for the Project.  These
>discussions, which will include opportunities for community feedback,
>will be complete by March 31, 2019.
>
>Regardless of the outcome of the discussions, we guarantee support for
>the stable/12 branch for at least 18 months, or at least 6 months after
>13.0 is released, whichever is later.  Again, these are minimum
>durations for the stable/12 branch support and they will not be reduced.
>
>After these discussions are complete, there will be a revised statement
>about the stable/12 branch lifetime.
>
>Release Engineering, the Security Team, Port Manager, and the Core Team