EOL plans for major versions

[Rickard Green]

On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 9:12 PM Adrian Ho <ml+erlang@REDACTED> wrote:
>
> On 8/7/20 8:29 pm, Mikael Pettersson wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 9:22 AM Lukas Larsson <lukas@REDACTED> wrote:
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> We support two major versions backward, so right now that would be 21
+ 22 + 23. OTP-20 went out of support when OTP-23 was released.

>
> OK, thanks much! We'll go ahead and deprecate OTP-20 in Homebrew then.
>
> > We patched OTP-21 locally for ERL-1205, but the fix broke things
> > rather badly.  ERL-1205 requires the followup fix in
> > 702f1c69a9e841e0dd278a96cf8c7bc4f9eac5f2, whose commit message only
> > mentions failed builds on BSD, but it also fixes runtime errors (loss
> > of precision in time-keeping) on Linux.
>
> Ah, that explains why Homebrew Catalina builds of OTP-21 didn't fail.
> Good to know.
>
> Thanks again!
>
> Best Regards,
> Adrian
> >
>

Cut from <
https://erlang.org/doc/system_principles/misc.html#supported-releases>:

> In general, bugs are only fixed on the latest release, and new features are
> introduced in the upcoming release that is under development. However,
> when we, due to internal reasons, fix bugs on older releases, these will be
> available and announced as well.
>
> Due to the above, pull requests are only accepted on the maint and the
> master branches in our git repository. The maint branch contains changes
> planned for the next maintenance patch package on the latest OTP release
> and the master branch contain changes planned for the upcoming OTP
> release.


The two releases immediately preceding current release fall under the
internal reasons. The older the release is, the less attention it gets. In
practice these preceding releases get quite a lot of fixes.

In this specific case MacOS Catalina was not available when OTP 21 was
current release and has therefore not gotten any fixes for Catalina.

Regards,
Rickard
-- 
Rickard Green, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB
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