Long Term Support schedule

[g105b]

With the release of v3, I want to make it very clear to anyone interested in using WebEngine of how its support is to be planned, specifically relating to the versions of PHP supported.

I want to keep PHP.Gt stable, but not so much so that it can't adopt newer PHP versions, etc.

One policy should be to freeze the latest stable PHP version at the point of major version release, so until the next major version release, no new PHP versions are adopted within the releases.

At some fixed amount of time after the first stable release, master will move to whatever is now the latest stable PHP release. New features will be implemented on master and only security and bug fixes will be backported to the Gt release on their own release branch.

[g105b]

Solution:

It will be too much effort to maintain backported versions of PHP.Gt repositories. Only one branch should be maintained per repo, with regular releases following semantic versioning.

In relation to what PHP version requirements are specified per repo, this should follow the largest Linux distribution's decision on what PHP version to consider safe and stable: Debian.

Debian is known for being a little out of date and not cutting edge - this is exactly what PHP.Gt needs to be. Stability over cutting edge features.

When any PHP.Gt repository is made into a new, major, stable release, whatever version of PHP the latest version of Debian ships with should be used as the PHP requirement.

For example, the newly released Debian "Buster" v10 ships with PHP 7.3 so the next PHP.Gt stable release while Buster is considered "Debian stable" will require PHP 7.3 in composer.json.

Some more thought needs to go into the LTS plan - a guaranteed amount of time that a PHP requirement will be kept - but the release schedule of Debian is nice and slow so should help with predictability.

[g105b]

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianReleases