LTS Releases

The speed of development on HASS is incredible and it’s great to see new features and improvements flying in, but each new release seems to come with new bugs. Most of these are fixed up pretty quickly in point releases, but I just wanted to ask if it would be possible to have some kind of LTS type release.
Less frequent and extra well tested releases that people can depend on to at the least not break existing functionality.

We talked about this in the past. The problem is that there is not enough manpower to back-port fixes and maintain multiple lines of releases at the moment. It hard to avoid breaking changes but if you only need to tweak one or two settings per month (if you skip a release) then the frustration is much lower than to update your complete setup after 6 month.

Components/platforms are tested when their dependencies are updated but it become nearly impossible to create a “well tested” release as there are way too many implementations to test and none of the developers has access to all supported physical hardware. The core part is covered with unit tests but at the end it’s software and software has bugs :slight_smile:

What really would help is that if more people run dev and report issues during the development cycle.

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@fabaff Perhaps it would be interesting to get a public or semi-public bug tracker such as Mantis where people can report bugs ? so it would allow dev to follow these more tight and also users to check if a bug is arleady known/existing/on way to resolve…
Might be opened only at some power users (or ones with enough posts in forum) to avoid spam, noises and lost of efficiency !!

There is the github issue tracker, so why have another issue tracker to make things even more complicated? More tool usually don’t mean it’s going to work better, it rather makes things more complicated as you would easily loose track of where which bug is going to be discussed.

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@cgtobi ah yep sorry didn’t notice there was Github tracker already active for HA :wink: so yep just use that existing tool !

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