There has been confusion about how far back we should support platform releases. This confusion often contributes to our Platform Team folks taking up extra backporting work that might be unnecessary, or simply being unclear on what’s expected of them.
Per our Platform Unsupported Releases (EOL) wiki page last updated in 2014 (!) by @burke, “OpenMRS can only support up to three released versions at a time (the current release and then two versions back).”
- I interpret this right now as supporting our current Platform major version (2.5.x) and 2.4.x and 2.3.x.
- This seems reasonable to me given 2.3 is from 2 years ago.
- We need to be realistic - we are not a SaaS shop, nor do we have enough full-time platform contributors, to backport everything everywhere.
- We would still give some limited support to implementers who really need a patch to older EOL’d versions - e.g. just like @ibacher did when the Bahmni community needed a patch to 2.1. for the log4j issue. He described the recommended approach and reviewed their PR, but making the actual fix was up to that implementer’s resources. We can update the Platform EOL policy to be more clear about this (the current message suggests we will leave implementers high-and-dry).
@burke @dkayiwa @raff @ibacher @mseaton how does this sound to you?
We can also explicitly ratify this at the next TAC call.