What's next for the LTS?

It's a little over a year since we launched the 4.2 LTS with the intention being to ensure security patches until at least the end of last year. Those of us who have been involved in or used the 4.2 LTS  consider it to have been a  success, providing a secure and very reliable release of CiviCRM, therefore saving support time. But we've recently seen a lot of organizations upgrading to 4.4 and the LTS no longer has the critical mass of users and contributors to keep it healthy. So, we decided to tail off the LTS for version 4.2

Stop PRESS Breaking News

Just as we decided to call it a day Giant Rabbit contacted us and said they would be prepared to continue porting Security fixes for 4.2 and 4.3 for another year. So far they have ported all security fixes except for https://civicrm.org/advisory/civi-sa-2014-001-risk-information-disclosure into the 4.3 branch so hopefully we will see a secure release of 4.3 out soon. (Note that SA-001 may not be backported as it is mostly warning about insecure server configuration). This weeks security release doesn't affect 4.2 or 4.3. Yay Giant Rabbit. Although they are taking the lead they will still want community support - in the form of help with patch-porting and potentially via gratipay (see further down).

What's next?

One of the reasons we have delayed making any announcement about the next LTS is that there have been differing opinions as to whether we should stick with our original 'soft' plan of doing an LTS every second release or skip to 4.5.

The arguments for 4.5 being that it will hopefully be the last 4.x release before we make significant architecture changes and also because 4.5 is a very attractive release with nice UI enhancements. However, 4.4 has been the current release for nearly a year  - meaning that it has very heavy adoption and organisations using it need to be able to continue using it securely until they are ready to move off it. Moreover the organisations who provided support for the 4.2 LTS are on 4.4 - with many not expecting to upgrade again in a hurry.

In light of this we are announcing 4.4 as the next LTS

We will work with the core team to jointly support 4.4 until they stop officially supporting it. We will then continue releasing 4.4 within the LTS framework and commit to ensuring security patches are available until at least the middle of next year. Depending on how the releases pan at this point in time the LTS may then switch to 4.5 or we may continue with 4.4.

What will be in the next LTS?

That's somewhat up to you. We commit to keeping it secure. We certainly expect that there will be a number of bugs having already been tagged as potential 4.4 LTS candidates - ie.

https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/issues/?filter=15410 and we are also open to backporting fixes / enhancements to ensure that extensions will run on multiple versions of CiviCRM. However, there is a limit to our resources and so the extent to which people support the LTS with developer & testing time and financially will determine how many fixes go into it.

How can I financially support the LTS?

We encourage you to donate $1 per site using the LTS or one of the releases supported by Giant Rabbit per week via gratipay - https://gratipay.com/civicrm-lts/. Gratipay donations are weekly, anonymous and paid by credit card. Think of the trouble avoided and time saved by being able to stay on 4.4 until you are ready to upgrade … certainly well worth this small fee, but you can also give more!

On the happy but miniscule possibility we are overwhelmed by donations the excess will be put back into bug fixes for core-supported versions.

How can I otherwise support the LTS?

Bug reports, or even better bug fixes; backports and other code contributions; posts and responses on the LTS forum; encouragements to the maintainers; or even just letting us know that you are using - it all sound good and will be greatly appreciated.

Who will support the LTS?

We have raised the possibility of the core team supporting it - the core team are, naturally, concerned about resources so for it to be taken up by the core team in future we would need to be able to demonstrate funding for it. So, we encourage you to demonstrate demand for the LTS.

In the mean time the same team of community members, augmented, hopefully, by you, will continue to support the 4.4 LTS

I'm upgrading what version should I upgrade to?

At the moment 4.4 is the latest stable version of CiviCRM and we recommend you upgrade to it. Once 4.5 is stable you should probably choose 4.5. We don't know whether 4.4 or 4.5 will have security releases for a longer period so the LTS shouldn't be a factor in your decision.