[Openembedded-architecture] Stable releases beyond one year

[Richard Purdie]

Our current stable release policy is to maintain the stable release
branches for around a year. Maintain means merging patches, running the
branch through the autobuilder periodically and running the full point
release QA and release process.

We need to figure out the "what happens beyond this point?" question
and I owe Armin an answer to this.

My proposal is that at this point, the releases move to a "community
maintained" mode. The maintainer can continue if they wish, the change
would be that the changes get pushed to a "-community-lts" type repo
instead.

The reason for the different repo is to highlight there is a change in
process and in guarantees on the status of the release. Keeping the
autobuilders building old releases is actually very very hard and not
something we can commit to with current resources and I want to make it
clear to users that something changes at this point. Equally I want to
enable people to still collaborate on changes and share them, rather
than doing them individually.

How does that sound to people?

I'm planning to document this in the YP Docs as we don't have any
information about releases in there at present and we should:
https://bugzilla.yoctoproject.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10888

Cheers,

Richard