Breaking changes

Leo Gaspard gnupg at leo.gaspard.ninja
Wed May 23 01:22:41 CEST 2018


On 05/22/2018 11:48 PM, Dennis Clarke wrote:
> On 05/22/2018 05:38 PM, Dan Kegel wrote:
>> Lessee...
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Privacy_Guard
>> already give an end-of-life date for 2.0, but none for 1.4.
>> And since Ubuntu 16.04 includes 1.4, there are likely
>> to still be a few vocal 1.4 users out there.
>>
>> How about announcing an end-of-life date for 1.4 that
>> is in the future (say, by 3 to 6 months)?
> 
> Too fast. Think 12 months as a minimum. There is prod code
> out there running for years and a timeline that allows proper
> project schedule/costing/testing would be better.

If the announced end-of-life is 12 months, then people will complain for
9 months, and maybe start working on migrating during the last 3 months.

I mean, I'm still seeing people actively developing python2 code bases
without even thinking of migrating to python3 *now*, and retirement was
initially announced for 2015…

The longer you leave people with maintenance, the longer they will want
maintenance past the deadline.

I think 3-6 months is more than enough, and if people can't manage to
update their production code in this time frame they can live with an
un-maintained GnuPG until they finish migrating (unless they want to pay
for paid support for continued 1.4 maintenance, that is).

I don't have a personal opinion, but dropping 1.4 appears to have two
advantages to me: first, it reduces the voluntary maintenance burden,
and second, it may help gather funding for work on 2.3, if people choose
to contract with g10code for continued maintenance.

GunPG 1.4 has been out for way longer than necessary, and people are
never going to migrate out of it unless they are forced to.



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