Surly this is just a formality. If there have not been updates for two years they are pretty-much dead projects anyway. Conversely if you have been running on an old system for two years without problems then its likely to be pretty stable, so you can just stick with it on the understanding that there will be no fixes or enhancements.
Well you have to define the term stable. There's a big difference between "doesn't need new features" and "is bug free" and "has no security issues"... There's also different methods to deal with the deprecation. I'd HATE to see them stop support entirely on those branches simply because there's little activity. So many sites rely on them that upgrading would be a non-trivial act. What I would rather see is a "staged" deprecation. Basically reduce 2.0 and 1.3 to "security and mission critical bug fixes only". That way if a major security issue is found, it can be fixed (same with a major bug, but at this point what's the chance of that)... After a set amount of time in that phase, support would be dropped entirely. So say the security support for a branch lasts 3 years. That way it gives admins a chance to upgrade the software without putting themselves at undue risk...
Surly this is just a formality (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Surly this is just a formality (Score:2)
Just my $0.02...