[hibernate-dev] Re: Hibernate ORM 5: end-of-life and upgrading

Hi Steve, I have a feeling that there is a slight misunderstanding here, for which I'm sorry. Please allow me to clarify some things. On Tue, 2022-05-31 at 07:31 -0500, Steve Ebersole wrote: Of course. I myself work in a small team as well, I know that it is really hard to support old software versions. We hardly offer extended support to our own users as well. I am not asking that at all. Sorry if it seemed that way, it was not at all my intention. I can imagine that Hibernate developers sometimes receive demanding requests from users who want free long-term support. I despise that, and I am well aware of the fact that the company I work for uses Hibernate under a gratis license, without any warranty whatsoever. Also, I have a lot of respect for people who put their spare time in a free- and open source project (as does the company I work for). No! I am not asking that at all! I am just trying to manage the expectations of my team members and helping them to upgrade to Hibernate 6 in a timely manner. At the same time I am trying to provide some feedback to the Hibernate developers. I think the reality is that people who use software that has been declared end-of-life by their suppliers often don't backport it themselves. I've unfortunately seen enough cases of this happening... (If it isn't clear by now, I am a big proponent of updating software in a timely manner instead of feet-dragging until you drown in "upgrade debt".) I put the X there deliberately. It is not at all my place to make decisions on this; how long users of older versions should receive bugfixes, and indeed if they should receive updates at all, is something that only the Hibernate developers can decide on. Sure. I'm not making any demands here. It is great that 5.6 will still receive updates for some time. My suggestion is just that the Hibernate developers put some statement on the website regarding what to expect in terms of backporting. The text I provided was just an example. If you would say that Hibernate devs would stop backporting fixes for 5.6 tomorrow, then I can make a compelling case to my colleagues that they should prioritize the upgrade to 6.0, meaning that we would upgrade earlier. But right now there is no such statement at all, meaning that it is hard to make this case, which results in us not deciding on prioritizing our upgrade. I hope this makes sense. Sorry, I think the word 'uncertainty' instead of 'doubt' would have been the better choice. English is not my first language... The uncertainty comes from not knowing whether the Hibernate release someone is using will receive backported fixes or not. I did not mean to extrapolate that to all users. Maybe I should have put "uncertainty among some Hibernate users" there as I do not in fact know whether many users experience this uncertainty. However, I am not the first one to voice this uncertainty, so it is not just *my* uncertainty either: - https://discourse.hibernate.org/t/hibernate-orm-versions-end-of-life-deta... - https://discourse.hibernate.org/t/end-of-life-hibernate/2772 I just noticed the backporting information linked to in that second forum thread, here: https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-orm/wiki/Huge-Project,-Small-Team However, the information in that wiki article is now outdated, and also doesn't seem to reflect the current practice of the Hibernate developers. (it also speaks about 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 being "major" releases, while the convention is that these point releases are called "minor" releases: https://semver.org/).