Tom,
> Or, as you say, we could take the viewpoint that there are commercial
> companies willing to take on the burden of supporting back releases, and
> the development community ought not spend its limited resources on doing
> that. I'm hesitant to push that idea very hard myself, because it would
> look too much like I'm pushing the interests of my employer Red Hat
> ... but certainly there's a reasonable case to be made there.
Well, I think you know my opinion on this. Since there *are* commercial
companies available, I think we should use them to reduce back-patching
effort. I suggest that our policy should be: the community will patch
two old releases, and beyond that if it's convenient, but no promises.
In other words, when 8.1 comes out we'd be telling 7.3 users "We'll be
patching this only where we can apply 7.4 patches. Otherwise, better
get a support contract."
Of course, a lot of this is up to individual initiative; if someone
fixes a patch so it applies back to 7.2, there's no reason not to make
it available. However, there's no reason *you* should make it a priority.
--Josh