Hi! I was wondering what is the purpose of an LTS version of Julia today? I understand that close to 1.0 release, an LTS version would be important because the language was changing very fast. However, given that release process is so stable, is there really a reason to keep supporting very old ve…

The problem with this approach proposed by you two is that it leads to a much higher amount of work for the package maintainers in terms of bug fixing and security issues. For packages with very few people developing (or even one), the only realistic scenario IMHO is either keep using only the feat…

[image] Ronis_BR: The latter would make Julia experience w.r.t it ecosystem bad for users using the LTS. I think the experience is already going to be bad for these people, relative to the rest of us. As @aplavin said, if stability is so important to these users, they’re probably not upgradin…

I fully agree! But in this case, wouldn’t it be better to just drop the Julia LTS version? The difference is that the LTS has bug fixes, which will happen only for the language itself and the stdlibs. Can’t we use the same argument: those who want stability will stick with a single Julia version?

It seems there are two questions here. Should Julia have a LTS version? Should my package backport bug fixes to the LTS? The first question is legitimate but for other people to answer. The second question is for you to answer and there is good advice above.

Often users who want stability still want security updates.

Yes! And that is precisely the problem. Notice that some people want stability and others want immutability. For those who want immutability, the Manifest.toml should work all the times. For those who want stability, are the new versions really problematic?

I think it is still good in principle to have an LTS version of Julia which will get bugfixes. Otherwise the only way to get those is to get the newest release, which may change additional things that affect maintenance workload.

But wouldn’t it be the same with the packages that do not support LTS? I suspect the majority of users use Julia+packages from the ecosystem.

[image] Ronis_BR: But wouldn’t it be the same with the packages that do not support LTS? I could be mistaken, but I think the likelihood of security vulnerability bugs in packages like PrettyTables is pretty small. And I suspect if you found one, it would be worth the effort for you to backpo…

[image] kevbonham: I think it makes sense to give those people a specific target version to prioritize, rather than haphazardly landing on whatever version is currently released when they get started. I think this is a fairly compelling argument in favor of having an LTS, if only to corral th…

Is there a good reason to have an LTS version of Julia?

Internals & Design

mbauman September 26, 2023, 6:09pm 18

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Is there a good reason to have an LTS version of Julia?

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