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

On Mon, 2022-05-30 at 09:35 -0500, Steve Ebersole wrote: Thanks for your reply, Steve. It would be nice if 5.6 continues to receive bugfixes for some time. That would allow us to further validate our recent update to 5.6 and prepare for the upgrade to 6.0 (or 6.1 when it's out). I can't find any statement on the Hibernate ORM website on this topic, but I see that 5.2 hasn't had updates since November 2018, while 5.3 received an update only last month. That would suggest that 5.3 is still somewhat supported. I understand from beikov's comment on the Hibernate forum that this is because of a commercial offering: https://discourse.hibernate.org/t/hibernate-orm-versions-end-of-life-deta... Would it be an idea to publish a policy on the website that clearly describes how long one can expect bugfix updates after a new release? I imagine this would help Hibernate users to plan their upgrades, and also serves as an encouragement to keep up with Hibernate releases, potentially preventing some people from keeping unsupported versions in use. Something like "The Hibernate developers strive to support each Hibernate release series for X months after a newer series has been released, to allow Hibernate users some time to upgrade". I think this would also reduce doubt among Hibernate users regarding the support status of the versions they have in use, as well as reduce "update fatigue" by allowing users to better plan their updates, and allow the Hibernate developers to save some time responding to questions like mine on the forum and mailing list ;) Anyway, thanks for considering. Imre