LTS - Long Term Support for Software ( example ESP-IDF )

[rudi ;-)]

Hi Guys

i read just in time the line in released ESP-IDF V3.3 LTS:

"Version 3.3 is the first ESP-IDF Long Term Support release. ESP-IDF v3.3.x will be supported for 2.5 years, until March 2022."

i have few questions:

from where do these timelines TLS come from?
we know Espressif provides a minimum longevity commitment to the product series. and we can read that too.
how and where is LTS regulated for development software?
what applies to bugs in "older versions", expired versions?
Is there a general chapter for it, is it determined arbitrarily, or is there clear guidance?

I am reading for the first time of such TLS timelines, it's new for me in the live of espressif to SOFT
not that I have something against it, that's right, full support from me,
but maybe it would be good to have a set of rules
which determines, for which timeframe which development versions as a general rule receive support or are supervised.

this should be included in the longevity commitment, so there is no misunderstanding, which is why "older versions" are no longer supported, and to indicate newer versions.

just a thought

best wishes
rudi

[ESP_Sprite]

This is new for 3.3, so there are no other documents describing this timeline. Non-LTS releases will be unsupported earlier, we will make an announcement before that happens. It's best to assume that an unsupported release will not receive any fixes from Espressif anymore, although we may still decide, at our own discretion, to backport selected bugfixes.

[ESP_Angus]

Like Sprite says, this is something new that we're introducing starting from v3.3. A full policy is being drafted and will be released very soon, but we wanted to announce the LTS status of v3.3 when we released it.

Until now, we haven't declared when an ESP-IDF version is no longer supported. However for a long time there have no more updates to ESP-IDF v1.0, v2.0, v2.1 - so these are "de facto End of Life" even though we haven't announced it.

We want to start announcing the support periods for ESP-IDF versions ahead of time so that everyone can make decisions about which versions they want to use, and plan in advance when they should update to a newer ESP-IDF version rather than having to wait and see what is supported.

The longevity commitment is similar but not exactly the same. Espressif has committed to supporting ESP32 (hardware and software) until 2028. This means that there will definitely be at least one supported ESP-IDF version that supports ESP32, and there will always be ways to update ESP-IDF to a supported version. But we can't support every version of ESP-IDF for the entire 12 years.