[lsb-discuss] roadmap synchronization and backwardcompatibility (was: Re: Needed network interfaces)

[Wichmann, Mats D]

>One of the things to consider here is the live time of the enterprise
>versions, RHEL and SLES. I think both promise customers patch support
>for 5 years after release, therefore one can expect that some customers
>will still be running RHEL 3 when RHEL 6 is being released, similar for
>SLES. Adding in the shift of release cycles between compilers,
>applications, and distributions I think anything shorter than 4 to 5
>years is pushing the envelop.
>
>If the deprecation policy is too short apps might be forced 
>into a yo-yo
>cycle, certified today, not certified next year, then certified again
>after that, this would be a terrible situation and people would loose
>interest.

I don't see where this situation would arise.

A released application is not going to be affected by anything
being phased out of a later LSB.

We still want applications to target the lowest-possible LSB version.

The only place removed interfaces would come into play would be
where an application needs to target the very-latest LSB version,
which means it is already using stuff that didn't exist in earlier
LSB versions, and in those situations possibly needing to work
around an extremely small number of removed interfaces (that were
previously flagged as ready to be dropped via the deprecation
mechanism - and it's not secret, appchk will warn about the
use of deprecated interfaces).