A widely deployed open source project published a long term support release carrying a five year maintenance commitment, completing a migration that has run across three development cycles and removing a compatibility layer maintained since the previous major version.
The release is the first in the series to drop the legacy interface entirely. Projects still depending on it were given two prior releases with deprecation warnings, a period the maintainers described as the longest the project has offered.
What changed
Beyond the removal, the release consolidates configuration into a single format, replacing three overlapping mechanisms that had accumulated over the life of the project. A conversion tool ships alongside and handles the large majority of existing configurations without manual intervention.
Performance work concentrated on startup time and memory use under concurrent load. Benchmarks published with the release show improvement in both, with the largest gains in deployments running many small instances rather than few large ones.
Removing the compatibility layer was the whole point of the cycle. Everything else is what we could do once it was gone.
Support terms
The five year commitment covers security fixes and serious correctness issues. Feature work moves immediately to the next development line, and the maintainers have said backports will be considered only where a fix cannot be separated from a feature change.
The project reported contributions from a slightly larger group of organisations than the previous major release, and noted that the proportion of changes coming from individual contributors rather than corporate sponsors held roughly steady.
