We had a very interesting discussion, with notes at http://notes.openmrs.org/2017-03-01-Design-Forum
The key point is that to support “quick non-LTS releases”, we should stop conflating “minor release of openmrs-core” with “release of the full Platform”.
Particularly, Bahmni needs to release something that’s part of the official OpenMRS main line, and that we can refer to by a released version number. But we’d like this to be as lightweight as possible to do, and we want this to be framed as “cutting edge” and/or less supported.
Thus we propose:
- When a group like Bahmni wants to spend the effort, they can do a minor release of openmrs-core
- this is not advertised as a release of “OpenMRS Platform”, just of openmrs-core
- this is advertised as “cutting edge”, and has no specific support duration
- there’s a release in maven, and a git release branch
- this release need not include building a standalone or updating the bundled modules (but if we do eventually automate this, it can)
- One Platform LTS release per year
- doing this requires updating the bundled modules, the CIEL dictionary, releasing a standalong
- doing this requires a longer end-user UAT window
- any openmrs-core release branch included in a Platform LTS release is supported as LTS for 3 years
- any module bundled in a Platform LTS release is supported for 3 years. (specifically, we’ll maintain backwards-compatibility of the module at least as far as the latest maintenance release of the openmrs-core release branch)
- version number of the platform release corresponds to the openmrs-core version it’s based on
A side effect is that Platform LTS version numbers may skip, if non-LTS versions of OpenMRS core were released in between. In practice, in the current scenario we’d expect to have:
- OpenMRS Platform 2.0 LTS (released 2016, supported for 3 years)
- openmrs-core 2.1 (release March 2017, no guarantee of support beyond release of 2.2)
- openmrs-core 2.2 (release in July 2017, no guarantee of support beyond release of 2.3)
- OpenMRS Platform 2.3 LTS (release in Q4 2017, supported for 3 years)
@burke and others, what do you think?