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Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] 2.6 branch planning and post-branch changes

From: Gerald Combs <gerald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2018 15:39:52 -0700
On 3/15/18 3:09 PM, Stephen Donnelly wrote:
> Gerald Combs wrote:
> 
>>>> As discussed previously we'll drop support for Qt 4 and GTK+ in the master
>> branch after master-2.6 is created. Unless there are strong objections I'd like
>> to bump the minimum GLib version to 2.32.
>>>
>>> Is there any reason to drop support for older versions of Qt 5 - which would
>> mean dropping support for, at minimum, Mac OS X Snow Leopard?
>>
>> Requiring 5.2 or later would let us remove most of our QT_VERSION_CHECKs.
> 
> Minimum versions of Qt 5.2 and Glib 2.28 should support back to:
> 
> EL6 + EPEL
> Fedora 18
> SLES 12
> OpenSUSE 13.2
> Debian Jessie
> Ubuntu trusty (14.04LTS)
> 
> https://wiki.wireshark.org/Development/Support_library_version_tracking
> 
> If you wanted to be more aggressive with Wireshark 3.0, what would the support policy for 2.6 be? Long enough to cover RHEL6 (2020/11) and Ubuntu 16.04LTS (2021)? Or maybe LTS support is not Wireshark's problem?

The current plan is to extend the support lifetime for 2.6 from the normal 24 months to 30, and to shrink the lifetime for 3.0 to 18 or 20 months. This would let us switch back to the normal summer release schedule and lifetimes for 3.2 and 3.4 without having more than three active releases:

2017  Dec │ Jan  2018  Dec │ Jan  2019  Dec │ Jan  2020  Dec │ Jan  2021  Dec │
──────── 2.2 ─────────┤
  ├────────────── 2.4 ──────────────┤
               ├────────────────── 2.6 ──────────────────┤
                       ├──────────── 3.0 ────────────┤
                                      ├────────────── 3.2 ──────────────┤
                                                      ├────────── 3.4 ────────