Have they announced details for LTS plan for v4? This is probably most critical for us.
We are finding it hard to convince clients already bitten once by angular upgrade costs and now second time with ionic upgrade costs. That v3 stopped getting any fixes 9 months ago further hurt the sentiment, and puts a sense of unnecessary urgency behind upgrading to v4 - which isn’t ready yet.
LTS for v3 for 1 year after v4 release would have been best. Small things like upgrading v3 for Angular 6, 7, TypeScript vNext etc… would mean that clients can postpone v4 upgrade for a while longer. And we as an agency can schedule projects to upgrade them 1-by-1 at a steady pace instead of having to rush through it.
In absense of v3 LTS, v4 LTS should be at least 2 years after vNext is released.
Ionic has been maturing for a few years now, and with our move to web standards like Web Components, we’re more confident than ever with the long term stability of the API we’ve developed, and for the millions of apps already using it. Starting with 4.0.0, we’ll be providing Long Term Support (LTS) with a defined support schedule for the Ionic community.
With LTS we’ll be able to provide developers and organizations additional confidence and stability for the apps they’re developing. The details deserve their own blog post(s), and to be honest we are still working through the specifics, but we’re modeling Ionic’s LTS support off of industry standards like Node.js. We are more than thrilled to offer this for the community, and we also plan to offer Extended LTS and other related benefits for our Ionic Enterprise customers (who should reach out to our Customer Success team for more details).
Long Term Support (LTS) respectively not stopping fixing bugs in order to focus only on a major version, like they did with v4, but still fixing major issues…but that’s my understanding of it don’t take it for granted
It is basically a commitment that after the a company has stopped actively developing a version, and shifted most of their development resources to next version with non-backward-compatible changes, they will still keep ‘maintaining’ the previous version for at least a predefined period of time so that existing projects don’t need to rush to upgrade their projects immediately and can decide to schedule their update to next version anytime before the LTS period ends.
As an example, checkout Node JS LTS plan. They keep every alternate version as a LTS release which gives them sufficient flexiblity to keep introducing new changes. And all projects using Node don’t have to keep chasing every release.
I don’t know if they have announced the LTS period yet. When will it start and when will it end? Will it start when v4 is released, or when vNext is released? Will it be 3 months, or a year or 2 years?
With Long Term Support (LTS), we plan to provide developers and organizations with stability and reliability in the apps they’re developing. For major releases, such as Ionic Framework 4.0.0, bug fixes are provided for 2 years and security fixes, although rare, are provided for 3 years. This means that when v5.0.0 is released, for two years past the release we’ll continue to fix bugs within the latest 4.x.x release.
