LTS Guarantees and Exceptions

By Michael Snoyman, 6 years ago

I’ve written up a PR slightly tweaking the LTS guarantees and exceptions. I encourage those interested to comment on the PR itself, and/or use the +1/-1 buttons on the PR description. I’ll include the text I’m suggesting we add to the MAINTAINERS.md document here. Note that the PR may be updated based on feedback, so it’s best to read the PR itself!

LTS package guarantees and exceptions

In general, we try to stick to some rules when it comes to the packages included in LTS minor bumps. In particular:

  • If a package exists in LTS-X.Y, it should also exist in LTS-X.(Y+1)
  • We should not include a major version bump of a package between LTS-X.Y and LTS-X.(Y+1)

However, there are some cases where exceptions may be made, based purely on Stackage Curator discretion. The most common examples are:

  • If a package does not follow the PVP in its version number policy, applying the standard version bump rules would not necessarily makes sense. As an example, suppose package foo decides to follow SemVer instead of the PVP. By our standard rules of version bumps, a change from foo-1.2.0 to foo-1.3.0 would be considered a major version bump, and disallowed in an LTS minor version bump. However, if a package is following SemVer, this would not be a breaking change, and curators may elect to include it.

  • If a package has overly restrictive version bounds on a dependency, in particular constraining a minor version unnecessarily, we may drop that package instead of artificially holding back the dependency. As an example: suppose LTS-20.1 includes foo-1.2.0 and bar-1. bar-1 has a dependency foo >= 1.2.0 && < 1.2.1, which is overly constrained on the minor version number according to the PVP. Then foo-1.2.1 is released. The Stackage Curator team would have two choices:

    • Reject foo-1.2.1 from LTS-20.2, since that is what bar-1 requires.
    • Drop bar-1 from LTS-20.2, and allow foo-1.2.1.

    Decisions will need to be taken on a case-by-case basis, and may depend on such issues as whether an important bugfix or security update in included. The curator team may also try to notify the author of bar to try and get a patched version released.

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