As I was tumbling deeper into the rabbit hole of patch management for XWiki, I found myself wondering how to determine if a branch has reached it’s end of life.
13.10.x
The last release notes for XWiki 13.10.11 state:
This is a bugfix release and the last release of the 13.10.x branch (since the 14.10.x branch is now the new LTS branch)
This confirms that 13.10.x has reached its EOL.
15.10.x and 16.10.x
According to the Versioning & Release Practices, 15.10.x and 16.10.x are the last and current LTS branches, meaning they should still be supported and not yet at their EOL.
14.10.x
But what about 14.10.x? The release notes for the last release, XWiki 14.10.21, state:
This is a bug fix release.
However, given that 14.10.21 has several critical vulnerabilities, will there be another release for the 14.10.x branch? Or is 14.10.21 already the final release for this branch, similar to how 13.10.11 was for 13.10.x, but without being explicitly marked as the last release?
It means that, as of today, we support 3 branches:
16.10.x which became very recently the new LTS
17.0.x which will became the new stable branch
master which is the branch we currently develop in
And by supported it means that we’re pushing bug fixes and security fixes in those branches.
Now for other branches it’s a bit a case by case basis: for example, we’re going to perform soon what we expect to be a latest release of 15.10.x before dropping it. It’s already officially not supported anymore but we have a few bug backported in it, so we release it before stopping the support.
For 14.10.x, what happened is that we’ve been requested by XWiki SAS to support it for longer than usual, so we agreed to keep backporting some bug fixes in it and to perform releases for it. Which explains why it kept having many releases.
Also note that the XWiki SAS employees do maintain a mid-year branch of XWiki, often named “recommended”, and that there’s a proposal to transform that as a mid-year LTS globally for the community, see: Switching to a LTS release every 6 months?
More precisely (to clarify the “we” that Simon used), some committers are also working for XWiki SAS and they took on them to support 14.10.x a bit longer. This is not a project decision, it’s just done by these committers. Same for the 15.4.x branch (mid year that Simon mentioned).
Note that any committer is free to support a branch, it just doesn’t commit the XWiki dev team. These releases are not advertised (and not present on https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Download/).
I think the easiest way to determine if a version is supported is to check the official download page - only those versions listed there are officially supported. XWiki SAS delivers patches for other versions to support clients, and some of them are maintained on public branches, but those versions aren’t versions supported by the XWiki open source project. If you need security patches for versions not listed on the download page, I would suggest getting professional support.
